Podcasts about pod academy

Let's talk 2025 Goal Setting for your Etsy shop! We'll discuss the actions you need to take to reach your income goals, how to level up your skills, the number one reason people fail on Etsy and more! WELCOME TO 2025!!!! **“How to Sell Your Stuff on Etsy” is not affiliated with or endorsed by Etsy.com  STUFF I MENTIONED:  Are you interested in an AI Workshop for Coloring Pages? Let me know here:  https://lizziesmiley.surveysparrow.com/s/AI-Workshop-for-Coloring-Pages/tt-HRxzs   Get Everbee, my fave SEO tool: https://www.everbee.io/?via=lizzie  ---------------------- Learn from Lizzie LOW TICKET: ➡️NEW Beginner Course: Six Figure Secrets to Getting Starting on Etsy: https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/six-figure-secrets   Use code SAVE50 to save $50    ➡️Trendspotting Membership: https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/offers/JxNYgLnw   Use code KEEP20 to save $20 on your first month  Get weekly emails with current trends + 5 product opportunities (POD/Digital)    ➡️ AI PNG and Tumbler Wrap Workshop: https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/ai-png-workshop   Save $50 with code SAVE50  ---------------------- Recommended Digital Product Course for Printables: Eprintables FREE Workshop by Gold City Ventures: https://lizziesmiley--gold-city-ventures.thrivecart.com/etsy-printables/66d7ac8d94110/ ---------------------- Recommended Higher Ticket Courses for POD: Brittany Lewis (@BeawolfBiz): https://www.beawolfbiz.com/a/2147505637/CKjfHLxd Special Bonus: Includes her Research Revolution course FREE!   HeatherStudio's POD Academy 3.0: https://studio.heatherxstudio.com/print-on-demand-academy-3-Howtosellyourstuff ---------------------- FIND LIZZIE: Find me on Instagram and TikTok @HowtoSellYourStuff  HOW TO SELL YOUR STUFF WEBSITE: https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/  HOW TO SELL YOUR STUFF SHOWNOTES: https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/162    

We're changing the name of our podcast to reflect the most integral part of the format: As Depicted on Film. In each episode, we pick 3+ films around a certain topic and breakdown the different depictions. Support us on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/adof

In this bonus episode, Gil Kidron and Rutger Vos graciously invite me on to their long-running show Pod Academy. This show is dedicated to applying a critical intellect to popular media, especially movies or TV series. In this bonus we discuss the 2014 movie Noah, staring Russell Crowe, Anthony Hopkins, Jennifer Connelly, and Emma Watson. With a special appearance by Ray Winstone, doing what Ray Winstone always does: being himself.

With Covid rates remaining stubbornly high and a huge pent-up demand for hospital care, the UK's National Health Service faces a tough winter. Intensive care wards are the canary in the mine, reports Rachael Jolley. Mark Toshner: We can make beds, but what we can't make are specialised staff to run those beds. The accident and emergency department needs a very specific skill set. And once you run out of their capacity, you don't really have anywhere to turn. The winter is going to be tough. I think that nobody's envisaging anything other than a really difficult winter and how difficult that is, I think we don't know, but it's going to be difficult. If you hear people from intensive care,  telling you things are tough, that's a really important canary down the mine, because these people are the SAS of clinical staff. And if they are telling you it's tough, you should be listening. Andrew Conway Morris: My unit is about a third full of COVID. We have spilled out into our higher independency area and we are ventilating patients in the high dependency area. Rachael Jolley: Welcome to Pod Academy. My name is Rachael Jolley. I'm a journalist and podcast producer. In this episode, we look at the challenges for the National Health Service as it faces COVID in winter 2021. With Welsh hospitals reporting some of the longest waiting times ever and the Scottish government calling in the army to help drive ambulances are we as prepared as we can be for the winter ahead? And what does it feel like inside one of the UKs most famous hospitals right now? In September Prime Minister Boris Johnson said further restrictions could be put in place if the NHS is threatened this winter. By the end of the month COVID hospitalisations were already at a high level. To find out more and see how different this winter might be from the last one I spoke with two doctors who work at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. We talked about how they'd coped so far and how they're preparing for this winter and what their biggest worries were. I spoke with Mark Toshner, an academic at Cambridge University, who is also a pulmonary physician, a specialist in illnesses relating to the lungs, at Addenbrooke's. While Mark doesn't normally work in intensive care last year, he was called into help out during the worst of the emergency. And Pod Academy also heard from Andrew Conway Morris, a clinical scientist at Cambridge University and a consultant working in intensive care at Addenbrookes. First we heard from Mark Toshner. Mark, if I were the Secretary of State for Health, what would you be asking me to do right now? Mark Toshner:  The first thing I would be asking is for our really honest acknowledgement that we're in a difficult place and that we have just under, I think we might even have topped 8000 people in hospital now and we've had that for weeks now, between about 7000 and 8,000 and that this was supposed to be our period of rest, or quiet time, during the summer. In actual fact we've seen almost historic highs of healthcare utilisation. That's a really tough start to then go into winter for, and, so we're in a really vulnerable position. Rachael Jolley: And Andy, what is it like in intensive care right now? Andrew Conway Morris: My unit is about a third full of COVID. We have spilled out into our higher independency area and we are ventilating patients in the high dependency area Mark Toshner: I've got plenty of colleagues who've essentially just been the coal face now for the better part of a year and a half or longer, and you can see the toll that it's taken on some of them. And it has a pretty heavy toll. And so the winter is going to be tough. I think that nobody's envisaging anything other than a really difficult winter and how difficult that is I think we don't know, but it's going to be difficult. We start off with one of the lowest ratios of doctors to population any way.

Welcome to another episode of Chessy Hour, where Babs & Timson continue the conversation that we had last week on our academy exodus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to another episode of Chessy Hour !! As the Euros finish and preseason begins, we talk about Chelsea's squad and the players we are linked with. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's not about individual countries. It's not about individual regions. It's not even about blocks. This doesn't work unless we vaccinate everybody. But is geopolitics getting in the way of good public health policy as we strive to overcome COVID-19?     In this podcast, Rachael Jolley, former editor-in-chief of Index on Censorship and research fellow at the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield considers how geopolitics is affecting government decisions around vaccines and distribution, with guests from the US, UK and the Philippines.   Mark Toshner: It's not about individual countries. It's not about individual regions. It's not even about blocks. This doesn't work unless we vaccinate everybody. John Nery:  The survey shows that something like 68% of Filipino adults have doubts about whether they should take the COVID-19 vaccine or not. Then that's just really worrying. Jeffrey Wasserstrom:   So we can think of it as soft power sort of related to having a space program, to have this idea that Beijing is one of the world capitals that's at the forefront of various technologies. Michael Jennings:  And if you look at many African countries, they've responded extremely effectively. They've made use of technology.  Rwanda has been making use of drones to get messaging to very remote communities. Rachael Jolley:  Hello, my name is Rachael Jolley and welcome to this episode of a series of podcasts I've hosted for Pod Academy on the global politics of the pandemic. In this episode, I talk to academics in the UK, USA and the Philippines about how national agendas are affecting decision-making, how the virus has to be tackled internationally and how history can sometimes get in the way. We also talk about misinformation around the disease and why, if we don't think globally, then in the end, the virus wins. Geopolitics is increasingly a major factor in the discussions around COVID whether about access to PPE or access to the vaccine. Delivery of stocks or stopping vaccine supply arriving over a border often gets tied up with the politics and economics between countries. As some nations trumpet how well they've done, they rank themselves against others. There's something of a global competition to see which national leader can take the most glory. In the midst of this, there are countries trying to win friends and influence people by delivering stocks of vaccine to those that don't have any. Economic alliances are being built or improved while others are being undermined. With us on the podcast are Mark Toshner, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a pulmonary vascular physician who spends a lot of time on Twitter answering the public's queries about vaccines when he's not looking at the impact of long COVID. We also hear from John Nery, who's based in Manila in the Philippines and teaches media and politics, and is the chair of the journalism centre at the Ateneo de Manila University. Also joining the conversation are Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor in the history of China at the University of California at Irvine, and Michael Jennings, Michael is a reader in international development in the department of development studies at SOAS, University of London, and researches global health and development. I started by talking to Mark Toshner. Mark, are you worried about geopolitics getting in the way of people's acceptance of vaccines? Mark Toshner: [00:03:09] The short answer to that is yes. I usually deal on social media with individual concerns about vaccines. And so I spend a lot of my time just addressing people and what their concerns are and, and I think they're complex and they vary from region to region. They vary from place to place, but the one thing that I think hasn't really been addressed very well in looking at how we improve uptake is that we've got a whole world to vaccinate here. So it's not about individual countries.

The 2021 Academy Awards are upon us! Joe and Greg welcome back Justin Louzon to discuss this years nominations, what categories they are most excited about  and their favorite films of the year. At the second half of the podcast they discuss a bracket to determine the best low budget best picture winner of all time. All that and MORE!

The death of writer and activist Nawal el Saadawi has just been announced.  In 2011 Tess Woodcraft interviewed her at a conference organised by the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Right Organisation for Pod Academy. We reproduce it here. Typically, and at 80 years old, she had stopped off at the Occupy encampment around St Paul's Cathedral on her way from the airport, before coming on to the conference. Note: there is also an Italian translation of this podcast, by Federica di Lascio, below. Nawal el Saadawi is one of the foremost Egyptian writers. A doctor by profession, she has written over 40 books of fiction and non-fiction, which have been translated into 30 languages. Since her very first novel, written in her twenties, she has taken on some of the most difficult, challenging, controversial subjects, including: female genital mutilation, domestic violence, child marriage, prostitution, the impact of war on women and children, so-called ‘honour killing’ and the laws that maintain women’s status as minors. It is not surprising perhaps that this has made her many powerful enemies. She has been forced out of employment, she was imprisoned by the Egyptian authorities in the 1980s and in the 1990s she lived under serious death threats from religious fundamentalists. Indeed, she was forced into exile. But now she is back in Egypt where, although now in her eighties, she took an active role in the demonstrations in Tahrir Square last Spring and continues to fight to ensure that women’s rights are part of the political settlement in Egypt. Her writing and activism are seen by women around the world as a beacon of light and she has received many awards, literary and academic. This interview was recorded at a conference in London organised by IKWRO, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, which works to end honour killing and sexual violence against women. Tess Woodcraft:   What did you mean when you wrote in your autobiography: ‘writing is my sole refuge, it’s like breathing’? Nawal el Saadawi:  My work is my love and when you love your work you can do it well.  Since childhood I was forced to study medicine, to become a doctor. But I didn’t dream of being a physician – I dreamt of art, music, poetry, dancing, writing novels. Of course there is no separation of creativity in science and art, but when I was a child I loved to move my body, to dance and this is natural.  But in Egypt at that time it was a taboo to be a dancer or a film actress, and it was very respectable to be a doctor. So I accepted the advice of my parents and went into the medical profession.  But all the time I felt that my writing was my life, and all the time I kept a secret diary under my pillow, and I have never stopped writing from then till now. It is more than oxygen, it is my life. It is more than breathing TW:  How do you see the relationship between your writing and your political activism? N el S: They are inseparable.  Writing and fighting are inseparable.  Why do we write?  Because it gives us pleasure.  Creativity gives us pleasure.  The pleasure of creativity is above everything – it can cure us of all our pains.  But of course creativity can also lead to you to prison and to exile because you challenge the system.  But the pleasure of creativity is more than the pain Nawal el Saadawi at the IKWRO conference TW: You’ve tackled some of the most difficult issues, – one of these is female genital mutilation.  Despite efforts to outlaw it, it is still practised in many countries.  Is it possible to change this? N el S: Of course, but there are many sexual problems in the lives of women – female genital mutilation, rape, honour killing, forced marriages.  They are usually tackled separately, but we have to connect in order to cure. In order to cure the problem, we have to know why we have it.  Why is the clitoris of women cut?  (and we have to link male genital mutilation to female genital mutil...

Journalism has sometimes been a dangerous profession during the pandemic, but there has been real innovation, too.  In this, the third part of our series on Journalism in the Pandemic, Rachael Jolley, former editor-in-chief of Index on Censorship and research fellow at the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield  considers how Covid 19 has influenced the future of  journalism.   Rachael Jolley: Welcome to Pod Academy and our third podcast in this series on journalism during the pandemic. In this episode we look at the challenges that reporters were just not prepared for. And what are the innovations and changes that come out of the crisis that will be significant for the years ahead. As the pandemic kicked off, the big challenge for many news organisations was to move their reporting teams to work completely remotely, so there was a massive shifting of equipment to people's homes. Suddenly all sorts of questions were being asked about filing stories in different ways and how to cover stories while reducing risks of infection. Very few had experience covering a pandemic before. And so there was no obvious formula to follow. Then there were the technical challenges of using new equipment or older equipment differently. At the same time, staff were off sick or on furlough or newsrooms were cut back because of financial pressures. So what were the toughest obstacles and what are the innovations that might make a difference to how journalism is done in the future? We talked to experts around the world to find out.  First, we went to Milan, the epicenter of the pandemic in Italy, and  talked to Laura Silvia Battaglia, the coordinator, and soon to be director of the Catholic University of Milan's journalism school and a journalist herself.   We kicked off by talking about the challenges for the journalism school and its students. Laura Silvia Battaglia: Here in Milan, we started in February thinking about how could it be possible to cover the pandemic. But we weren't really conscious about the challenges for our profession and also about the risks at the beginning. No one knew exactly what COVID-19 was. We started thinking about the safety for our students and the risks related to  covering these areas. So the challenges were very significant because we used to send our students around like every reporter does. But at the same time they are students. We told them immediately, to try to keep a distance, the safety distance, how to cover yourself using masks, using face shields.  So we provided all this stuff to our students and we decided  only the people that really wanted to go out for reporting (of course, covering themselves and trying to avoid  any risk and following the rules). So only the people that wanted to they did it and the others who didn't want to go reporting, they would not, they would work at a desk for our publications. Rachael Jolley: Here is Richard Sambrook, a former director of global news at the BBC and now director of the centre for journalism at Cardiff University on why it was difficult for news organisations to know where to start.... Richard Sambrook: Nobody has had direct experience of reporting a pandemic like this before. So I think it took quite a while for people to understand how to use the statistics, how to use the figures, what to expect from the science and so on as well. That took quite a lot of catching up with even for some of the health specialists. There's the whole question of being remote from the community they serve. Because actually, if anything that we've learned over the last few years is journalism has been too remote needs to get closer to the community. But now the pandemic's come in and now got in the way of that as well. So trying to report the impact, you know, in ways that are still COVID compliant is difficult and challenging and quite complicated. And then we've seen a huge rise in disinformation around COVID and around ...

Authoritarian restrictions on the press, attacks on journalists in the streets and more accusations of 'fake news' - it's like a war zone out there.  Rachael Jolley looks at the dangers of reporting during the Covid -19 pandemic. Jolley (@londoninsider) has developed a series of podcasts for Pod Academy on News in the Pandemic, this is the second in the series. William Horsley: They say that the first casualty of war is truth, but pandemic is in the same category Jean-Paul Marthoz:  Today being a journalist, you don't show necessarily that you are press. It's like going to a war zone Lada Price:  In Bulgaria, there are several reports of journalists being attacked, despite clearly identifying themselves as members of the press. Kirstin McCudden: We started keeping track of journalists who were harassed for covering the protests (which would be part of a normal news gathering routine, of course) Donald Trump: They are the fake, fake, disgusting news Rachael Jolley: My name is Rachael Jolley and welcome to Pod Academy. This the second in our series on journalism during the pandemic. Worryingly, we're seeing the escalation of violence and aggression during this global pandemic as journalists literally battle to report on vital and public interest stories. From physical attacks to attacks on journalists' reputations to governments introducing new legislation, putting limits on reporting, those that don't want journalists to report an issue will try all sorts of measures to try and stop them even threatening to try and infect them. These are terrifying trends. The pandemic appears to have allowed the powerful to gain more tools in their armoury when it comes to squeezing media freedom. William Horsley is co-founder and international director of the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield's department of journalism. William is also a former television and radio journalist at the  BBC. William Horsley: They say that the first casualty of war is truth. It turns out that pandemic is in the same category because what it does is it increases physical risk in many ways for journalists as they go about their business, particularly for example, reporting on the lockdowns. But also it gives governments the reason to assume much more executive power. And this happened against the background, of course, of a shift towards a much more authoritarian style, particularly assaults against the free and independent media.  Rachael Jolley:  Lada  Price, a senior lecturer in journalism from Sheffield Hallam University, talks about the way that this kind of emergency legislation brought in during the pandemic has been used in Eastern Europe to restrict what journalists can do. Lada Price:If you look at reports that have been issued by organisations such as Freedom House, Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders they have all raised the alarm about emergency measures that have restricted media freedom severely. Let's take, for example, Eastern European countries, such as Hungary, where at the onset of the pandemic, the government introduced laws, or rule by decree, indefinitely bypassing parliament. And that is known as the Authorisation Act. And that included actually prison terms from one to five years for those, and that could include journalists, that spread misinformation and false hope. Rachael Jolley: It's not just in Eastern Europe that governments have used COVID-19 to pass laws to restrict freedom of the press William Horsley: By June of 2020, Reporters Without Borders was reporting that half the UN member states had already enacted emergency laws, which were endangering free speech. At the end of the year, the UN Secretary General himself said that there was a pandemic of misinformation and that although the role of journalists was much more important because of the need for good information about the pandemic, in fact,

Local newspapers have been in decline for years, but the decline has been massively exacerbated by the Covid pandemic.  Can a new type of hyper-local journalism be the answer for local news and local democracy? And how will it be funded? Rachael Jolley (@londoninsider), Research fellow @sheffjournalism and former Editor  in Chief of Index on Censorship, has developed a series of podcasts for Pod Academy on News in the Pandemic.  This one, on local journalism, is the first in the series. Intro excerpts... Rachael Jolley: My name is Rachael Jolley. Welcome to Pod Academy and  our series of three podcasts, exploring journalism during the pandemic. In the first of the series, we talk about local journalism. it's economics and job losses, the hurdles and the technical challenges and find out about pink slime sites. Our, first guest is Damian Radcliffe, professor of journalism at the University of Oregon. We started off by talking about how journalists have responded to the challenges of working during the pandemic. Damian, what do you  think have been the biggest challenges for local journalists in the US and elsewhere during this period? Damian Radcliffe: [00:00:21] Well, I think there's been a lot of different challenges that local news outlets have faced. Some of those are sort of long-term structural issues in terms of trust. It access to, to read as an audience is advertising revenues and so forth. And then we've also seen a whole bunch of pandemic-era, issues that have suddenly emerged, such as reporting safely and from a distance, the emergence of culture wars around mask wearing, which has been very pronounced, , here in the United States and massive uncertainty about the future of the profession as [00:01:00] a result of both. Large-scale job losses that we have seen, you know, they're not unique to local journalism. We've seen that over the course of the last 10, 15 years, but have really, really accelerated over the course of the last nine to 10 months and a real reckoning about the sort of future of local journalism against a new civil rights movement and kind of racial backdrop, which is rightly making a lot of newsrooms ask if they are still fit for purpose. Rachael Jolley: [00:01:28] Interestingly, we have seen quite a surge in readership for some local news sites. Why does that happen do you think? Damian Radcliffe: [00:01:36] I think the biggest reason why we've seen that surge is that there was so much, and there continues to be so much, uncertainty about the implications of the pandemic and what it means for you and your family, for your work, for your community and so forth. And you just can't get the level of granularity that you might need to make informed decisions about your life. And what you do day to day if [00:02:00] you're accessing national news. So in that environment, local news really comes into its own in terms of being able to take that bigger picture and being able to unpack it for audiences at a local level. So I think that's been a key reason why we've seen, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic, a lot of growth of, of interest in, in local journalism, because it's answering questions that other outlets are just not answering. Rachael Jolley: [00:02:26] You've mentioned in some of the work that you've done, that local news sites such as the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Times have seen a spike in readership. But that's not true of the readership of some more directly partisan sites. What do you think is happening here? Damian Radcliffe: [00:02:43] It's a great question. I think to be honest part of it, we just don't know, but I wonder if some of the reasons for that are around trust and kind of going to sort of more neutral sources and kind of more non-partisan sources to try and get a sense  of what's going on. And, critics of some of those outlets would still say that they have an agenda, but I think they're sort of more,

Imperial China has survived from antiquity all the way to the beginning of the 20th century - an unequalled historical feat. How do Chinese filmmakers view that? Are there differences between directors from Hong Kong, from Taiwan, and from the mainland? What does Hollywood do with it? Rutger and Gil glide through 2000 years of rich history through a Pod Academy record of 9 movies: Hero (2002), Red Cliff (2008), Dragon Blade (2015), Mulan (animated, 1998), The Great Wall (2015), Mulan (live-action, 2020), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2001) and The Last Emperor (1987).   Visit our website: https://www.ourpodacademy.com To become a friend of the show: https://patreon.com/podacademy For a one-time donation: https://www.paypal.me/gotacademy Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/OurPodAcademy Send us an Email to: us@podacademy.com  

(Christine and Elizabeth) In our last episode we discussed revolutions in the United States and France, and this time we turn our eyes toward China and Russia. Here, our Summer Special crossover concludes with Christine and Elizabeth chatting with Pod Academy’s Gil and Rutger about 1965’s Dr. Zhivago and 1987’s The Last Emperor.   Want Footnoting History merch? Check https://www.teepublic.com/stores/footnoting-history/ Able to support us through Patreon? You can find us here:  https://www.patreon.com/Footnoting_History

We're changing our name to POD ACADEMY! We have a new website! And a new logo! Woohoo! Rutger and Gil are officially tying the knot in their partnership (well, our partnership), as the two halves of this podcast - Pod Academy. We're keeping the Academy brand name, and leaving the GoT to the YouTube channel. We also have a new website where we'll post all our new episodes, and in the future add a blog and some other cool stuff. We want to thank our patrons for supporting our work!   Visit our website: https://www.ourpodacademy.com To become a friend of the show: https://patreon.com/podacademy For a one-time donation: https://www.paypal.me/gotacademy Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/OurPodAcademy  

Pod Academy's Chair, Chris Creegan, reflects on Covid-19 and HIV.

Pat Thane, Research Professor at King's College, London and Professor Emerita, University of London, explores the social and political history of Britain over the past 100+ years with Pod Academy's Lee Millam, as they discuss her latest book, Divided Kingdom. This podcast is a tour de force as Professor Thane takes us from the founding of the Labour Party in 1900 in response to low wages and poor working conditions, through 2 world wars and the arrival of globalisation with its attendant precarity and poverty wages.  Highlighting changing living standards and expectations and inequalities of class, income, wealth, race, gender and sexuality,  she reveals what has (and has not) changed in the UK since 1900, explaining how our contemporary society, including its divisions and inequalities, was formed. Over the years there are recurring themes such as housing shortages and women's campaigns for equality, and there are some surprises - the much derided 1970s were actually the time of the greatest equality! Divided Kingdom, a history of Britain 1900 to the present by Professor Pat Thane is published by Cambridge University Press.

Hello, this is Pod Academy.  Of late, there has been much talk of sexism, in particular sexual harassment, behind the scenes in the film industry.  But what about the films themselves?  Pod Academy’s Tatiana Prorokova took a look at the hit movie Beauty and the Beast.  One of the highest grossing films this year, it has taken over $1bn worldwide. The recent adaptation of the famous Disney cartoon – Beauty and the Beast – is the film that through a children's story raises the profound questions of female oppression and sexism that have existed in our society for centuries. The story focuses on the girl Belle (played by Emma Watson) who lives with her father in a small village in France. Belle is considered weird by most of the villagers and the reason for that is her love for books. The girl is frequently portrayed with a book in her hands; such an image, however, provokes rather negative responses from the people around her primarily because they believe that education, which, in this context, is access to books that Belle has, is not for women. The scene that illustrates this idea even more vividly takes place later in the film when Belle is teaching a small girl how to read. The crowd largely disapproves of that. Sexism thus manifests itself not only through the reactions to the girl who likes reading but also, and perhaps even more crucially, through the idea that men and women have different privileges. This foregrounds gender inequality and reminds the audience about the perverse norms that were generated and sustained by patriarchy. Belle later finds herself in the castle, where she came to save her father (played by Kevin Kline). She chooses to stay there instead of him, sacrificing herself for the well-being of her parent. Her stay in the castle supports the ideas of sexism and female inequality in multiple ways. First and foremost, being the Beast’s (played by Dan Stevens) prisoner, she is literally locked in the castle. Yet one can interpret this imprisonment from a different angle and argue that it figuratively embodies the existing gender inequality. The visibly subordinate relationship between Belle and the Beast metaphorically visualizes patriarchy in the family life or perhaps even stands for family tyranny. In this respect, the image of the Beast only intensifies the power and cruelty of the oppressor. The castle becomes Belle’s cage where she is both literally and symbolically locked. The girl can only wait for someone from the outside to come and save her. That savior, as the audience can easily guess, could be Gaston (played by Luke Evans) – the former soldier who wants to marry Belle. Belle is thus portrayed as a fragile girl who is oppressed by a male and who can be ultimately saved only by another male. In the castle, the enchanted servants forcefully redress Belle so that she can look like a real lady – again, the image that is constructed by patriarchy as the only right one and imposed on women. Belle is portrayed in a pompous dress, she is wearing a wig, and her face is richly covered with vulgar makeup. The girl ultimately rejects these clothes, preferring to stay in her old ones. While the castle symbolizes Belle’s cage, it is pivotal that this is the only place where she is not laughed at for her love for books. The Beast shows her his large library and Belle’s heart seems to melt, for she now has something that she wanted to have so much – access to education. Nevertheless, Belle remains a prisoner; thus while she gets something what she likes, she is still under full control of the Beast. Apart from Belle, there is another important female character in the film that is introduced to support the issue of sexism provoked by patriarchy. This is Agathe (played by Hattie Morahan). Agathe is first introduced to the audience as a beggar who saves the life of Belle’s father but later turns out to be the enchantress. There are several scenes in the film with Agathe and Gaston that ...

When the gun is replaced by the melody: how does music resist? ‘Even if they don’t have a message, the act of actually playing music itself is resistance,’ says Dr. Sara McGuiness, senior teaching fellow in Music at SOAS. Classical Thai musician Luang Pradit Pairoh fought through the melodies of his songs surrounded by oppression; Ahmed Maher signed petitions to bring down the Morsi government in Egypt whilst at concerts around the country, and the melody of an old Catalonian song travelled almost a century of different resistance movements. This is a podcast of musical adventures. It features conversations with musicians, writers and academics with special guest appearances from random people pulled off the street. ------------------- The podcast was produced by Lara Şarlak, Fino Patanasiri, Diego M. Mosquera and Kelly O’Donovan, students on  'Digital broadcasting', an MA course taught  as part of the skills training options offered to MA students studying within the school of arts (which combine music, media and history of art and archeology) at SOAS, University of London. This course exposes students to the latest thinking in digital podcasting, social media research and social entrepreneurship. During the course students make a group podcast on a theme related to research at SOAS and are encouraged to disseminate them as widely as possible using digital platforms. Pod Academy is involved in the teaching on the course. ------------------- Ahmed Maher: Listening to the concert on a CD and attending one on the street, in the middle of everything cannot be compared to one another. Esteve Sala:  They were trying to mobilize a society against the dictatorship with their songs. Fino Patinasiri:  So instead of fighting back actively, he chose to use music as a weapon of hidden resistance.   Vox Pops E contare e camminare insieme, lo sai fare? Sì, penso di sì... Allora forza. Conta e cammina. Dai. Uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, sette, otto.. [Song: Modena City Ramblers (I Cento Passi) ] Vox pop: My resistance song is “i cento passi.” It is the story of the son of a mafia boss who resisted against his father and go killed in Italy, and no one ever spoke about it for a long time. [Song: Chuck Berry (Roll Over Beethoven)] Vox pop: “Roll Over Beethoven” is a protest song because it was a sort of protest against almost a sort of your parents’ culture, your grandparents’ culture. [Song: Ton Steine Scherben (Live on TV)] Vox pop: “Ton Steine Scherben” [Song: Bob Marley (Exodus)] Vox pop: Umm, “Exodus”? Bob Marley. [Song: Victor Jara (Los Estudiantes)] Vox pop: “Los Estudiantes” by Victor Jara. [Song: I Solisti Dell’Oltrepo Pavese (Bella Ciao)] Vox pop: This guy called Deniz Gezmiş. He was executed by the Turkish army. He was whistling this song. “Rodrigo’s Guitar.” [Concierto De Aranjuez For Guitar And Orchestra: II - Narciso Yepes] Vox pop: My favorite resistance song is “Bella Ciao.” It’s about the partisan movements and resistance to fascism in Italy. [Song: Shehzad Roy(Ham Aek Hein)] Vox pop: In Pakistan there is a growing tradition of songs about unity. There’s one called “Ham Aek Hein”, which in Urdu means “We are one.” [crowds cheering ‘’Azadi song] Vox pop: Kashmir is a conflict zone, so there are many resistance songs. People sing against the Indian state. Azadi. “Azadi” means freedom. So they always chant, “What do we want? We want freedom.” [Song: N.W.A.(Fuck the Police)] Vox pop: Particular song, ummm. I don’t know. N.W.A., “Fuck the Police.” That’s kind of a guess. But I’m quite into like hip hop. I guess that’s kind of a form of resistance, kind of voice of the oppressed working against oppression. Yeah. Interviews [Song: Okay Temiz (East Breeze)] Dorian Lynskey:  I’m Dorian Lynskey. Music journalist, and author of 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs.

Autism is a condition that affects about one in a hundred of us.  But few people understand or can recognise it.  This can have serious implications when people with autism encounter the criminal justice system. Recent research by City University and the University of Bath suggests that most people with autism, and about 75% of their parents,  are left very upset after dealings with the police.  April is Autism Awareness Month, and Pod Academy's Lee Millam  went to talk to Dr Laura Crane of City University London, to find out more. Lee Millam:  Autism is a complex condition for which there is no cure.  The main features are problems with social communication and interaction. Laura Crane:   Everyone with autism is very different, but people with autism all show the same key features - impairment in interacting with people socially and repetitive behaviours, interests and activities. These really vary so you could have one persion with autism who is very verbally and intellectually able, whereas others may not speak, they may have intellectual disabilities and may need full time care to meet their needs. Autism can affect anybody, we don't know what causes it and it is sometimes quite hard for people to be diagnosed because some signs can be very subtle.  But it can affect anybody.  One in a hundred means 700,000 people in the UK. Because we don't know what causes autism there are no treatments, but there are lots of interventions available to enable people with autism to lead rewarding and fulfilling lives - in schools, in the community - to help people with autism get jobs or help them learn in the classroom. But there is no cure.  If you have autism you live with it throughout your life. There have been lots of high profile cases in the media where  people with autism have come in contact with the police and the outcomes haven't been very positive. We wanted to see whether these experiences were rare, but actually they were very common.  It wasn't just these extreme cases we hear about.  We did a survey of 400 police officers and 100 member of the autism community (parents and autistic adults) and we asked them about the experiences of autism within the criminal justice system - what they think worked well and not well. The police were generally fairly satisfied with how they worked with individuals with autism but the autistic adults and their parents were not.  69% were dissatisfied.  It shows there is a disparity between the views of the police and the view of people with autism themselves. That is something that needs to be addressed. One of the key problems is that the police often direct their resources towards people with quite classic signs of autism - difficulties with language, intellectual impairment, very clear social impairments.  And on the other end of the spectrum you have individuals who are very articulate, very verbally and intellectutally able and they're often termed as having 'high funtioning autism' or Asperger's syndrome.  When the police come into contact with someone with a diagnosis of high functioning autism or Asperger's syndrom, they might see that their symptoms aren't very obvious.  They can verbalise what happened and give a fairly good account of what's gone on, but actually they need a lot of help and support as well and I think the police might overlook that because they'll over estimate the capabilities of that person. I think one of the key issues is autism awareness.  Lots of people have heard of autism, they may be aware of a friend or family member who has an autism diagnosis, but few people know exactly what that means.  They wouldn't necessarily know if someone they met had autism.  It is a hidden condition unlike other conditions (eg Down's Syndrome where people have a characteristic appearance). Training police officers about the characteristics of autism - so when they encounter someone with autism they can identify that this person is vulnerable a...

"We know the jockey wants to win the race, and it is beguiling to imagine the horse knows what the challenge is, knows somehow the significance of the finishing post and therefore is a willing participant in this endeavour. If you buy into that framework you can imagine the horse views the whip strikes purely as a form of encouragement.  'Thanks for the encouragement, I needed that....'" The use of the whip in horse racing is an issue.  It is banned in some countries and there are regulations governing its use in others. It is widely used and as Dr Paul McGreevy explains in this podcast, it can be misused. This is our second podcast on animal welfare and horse racing in collaboration with Knowing Animals, a podcast show from Australia which looks at academic research in the field of animal rights and animal welfare. In this podcast, vet Dr. Paul McGreevy from the University of Sydney talks about his paper Whip use by jockeys in a sample of Australian thoroughbred races – an observational study ( authors: Paul D. McGreevy, Robert A. Corken, Hannah Salvin, Celeste M. Black PLOS ONE i2012) with Dr Siobhan O'Sullivan of Knowing Animals.  He also explains his policy work trying to create policy change around the use of whips on racehorses in Australia. The goal of the study was to explore the use of the whip in horse racing and to characterise the area struck and the visual impact of whip use at the level of the horse. Dr McGreevy and his colleagues measured the ways in which both padded and unpadded sections of the whip made impact. There was evidence of at least 28 examples, in 9 horses, of breaches of the whip rules (one seam contact, 13 contacts with the head, and 14 arm actions that rose above the height of the shoulder). The whip caused a visible indentation on 83% of impacts. The unpadded section of the whip made contact on 64% of impacts. The results call into question the ability of Stewards to effectively police the rules concerning whip use and, more importantly, challenge the notion that padding the distal section of whips completely safeguards horses from any possible whip-related pain. Photo: Corinne You may also be interested in our podcast on horse deaths in jump racing - another collaboration between Knowing Animals and Pod Academy

In this podcast Dr Sonja Schillings explores how the use of the Latin term Hostis Humani Generis (the enemy of all mankind), which was originally applied to pirates, now creates an extralegal space which is being used to legitimise the assassination of international terrorists all over the world. This is just part of her forthcoming book, Hostis Humani Generis and the Narrative Construction of Legitimate Violence. Podcast presented and produced by Tatiana Prorokova. Tatiana Prorokova: Hello and welcome to Pod Academy. My name is Tatiana Prorokova and I am glad to have here Dr. Sonja Schillings to discuss her forthcoming book based on her dissertation titled Hostis Humani Generis and the Narrative Construction of Legitimate Violence. Before we proceed, however, I’d like to say a couple of words about Dr. Schillings’ academic career. She wrote her dissertation at the graduate school of North-American Studies at Freie-Universität Berlin in Germany, where she also held a position of a substitute junior professor for North-American Literature in summer semester 2014. And since October 2014, she is a post-doctoral researcher at the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at Giessen University in Germany. So, Sonja, in your dissertation, your main concern is the relationship between two criminal groups - pirates and terrorists. You argue that both have one thing in common and that is they can be characterized as Hostis Humani Generis. Could you elaborate on that and maybe explain your choice of these particular groups? Sonja Schillings:  My basic concern is about Hostis Humani Generis.  It is a legal term of arts,  a Latin term, which means “enemy of all human kind”,. It is, quite generally, a legal fiction that is assigned to perpetrators who are considered not just enemies but enemies of the law, of the normative order.  They are enemies so hostile and so extreme that you can  commit legitimate violence against them, just because you commit it against them. And it’s a term that was traditionally,  in legal history, equivalent or synonymous with the crime of piracy. And “the enemy of all” means that everybody, without distinction, is being attacked by them. This is why violence against them is said to be representative of the entire human race.  Or rather it’s claimed to be. The claims I look at are only ever in text. So much for that. So, pirates and terrorists. As I’ve been saying, Hostis Humani Generis was originally designated to describe pirates only, until the early nineteenth century when Hostis Humani Generis and the crime of piracy separated and Hostis Humani Generis was also used to describe slave traders – international slave traders. And then later, in the twentieth century, it was also used about perpetrators of crimes against humanity - the torturer is the most established example here. And now, what we see since the 1980s, is the political initiative to describe international terrorists as pirates. It is this link that originally spurred my interest in the topic of Hostis Humani Generis because other than the fiction itself, other than , the legal description of Hostis Humani Generis, and other than the characterization of what they do to society (i.e. the orders they attack), pirates and terrorists have very little in common.  Even so, they were constantly combined or associated with each other, despite the grave reservations of the entire maritime securities community. This is what the “pirate-terrorist nexus” refers to. T.P: So, you provide a brief historical overview of this “pirates-terrorists nexus”. But can you actually spot any difference between pirates and terrorists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Was there any shift after 2000/2001? S.S.: Well, yes and no. There was certainly a shift of it being more do-able – first of all that. And, second of all, you suddenly had Somali pirates, which is why maritime security became seen as piracy -  mariti...

"We are developing the discipline of feminist legal history, which scarcely even exists in this country...Feminist history asks a different set of questions."  (Rosemary Auchmuty) In this podcast about the Women's Legal Landmarks project, author and barrister Elizabeth Woodcraft talks to Professor Rosemary Auchmuty of Reading University's School of Law and Professor Erika Rackley of Birmingham Law School.at the very start of the project.  Their conversation ranges over the aims and methodology of the work, some of the landmarks they will be exploring and, importantly, their aspirations for the project. 2019 marks the centenary of women’s formal admission into the legal profession.This was a key legal landmark for women but, of course, it was not first. Feminists have a long history of engaging with law and law reform with the result that women’s legal history is full of landmarks – key events, cases and statutes – shaping and responding to women’s lives and (diverse) experiences. To commemorate the centenary of women’s admission into the profession, this project aims to bring together interested feminist scholars to engage in the process of identifying and writing about key legal landmarks for women. It will not be accounts of the 'usual suspects' - not, for example, the Equal Pay Act - but rather the Ford Dagenham women workers' strike that was so important in the development of the legislation. This discussion ranges across time and place - Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England.  Importantly, it points to the campaigning that underpins all of these landmarks  - from the campaigns for animal cruelty legislation in which women campaigners played a central part (because of the fashion for ostrich plumes in hats), and anti-slavery campaigns to recent campaigns for women on banknotes, and from the totally different style of campaigning by the women of Greenham Common to recent successful campaigns against rape pornography. This is early days for the Women's Legal Landmarks project it is estimated to be a two-year project (2015-2017) - there has just been a call for papers, and the first workshops have been held.  So over the next few years, Pod Academy will keep you posted on progress.  In the meantime, do get in touch with the project , they are keen to hear from women and men who want to celebrate women's legal history. and to encourage the development of a network of feminist scholars and activists. The collected landmarks (each essay between 1000-6,000 words) will be published in an edited collection, accompanied by an extract of the relevant primary material, photograph or other source. In addition, there will be a website in the form of an online exhibition with further links to primary sources. Photo: Craftivist Collective           If you have enjoyed this podcast, you may also be interested in two of our other podcasts about women and the law. Being a Feminist Barrister Feminism and the Law  

There's a little red-faced man, Which is Bobs, Rides the tallest 'orse 'e can- Our Bobs. If it bucks or kicks or rears, 'E can sit for twenty years With a smile round both 'is ears- Can't yer, Bobs? That is the ditty British troops would recite about Field Marshall Lord Roberts (1832-1914) veteran of the Boer War and the 19th century wars in Afghanistan.  In this podcast, produced by Love Archaeology for Pod Academy, Tom Horne and Terence Christian explore the life of Lord Roberts whose statue in Kelvingrove, Glasgow has been restored recently.  They talk to his biographer, Dr. Rodney Atwood (The Life of Field Marshall Lord Roberts) and then take a walk in the rain to Kelvingrove to see the statue. Popularly known as ‘Bobs,’ Roberts was born in 1832 and died on the Western Front in 1914. Roberts won the Victoria Cross, as his son would go on to do, in the Boer War in South Africa. He’d also be involved in the strategic defence of India. As a course of this, he campaigned successfully in Afghanistan. Later on he also saved the British army from disaster in South Africa before going on to introduce army reform and campaigning for national service. He was one of the few who recognised that Imperial Germany was going to be a threat to European and world peace. Before and after his death, Field Marshal Lord Roberts was honoured with memorials in Glasgow, Kolkata, and London and also, during his life, he was immortalised in poetry by none other than Rudyard Kipling. Also, being very much aware of the power of the press and the necessity to craft one’s own image, he published an autobiography entitled Forty-One Years in India. When he died visiting the troops in France in 1914, he lay in state in Westminster Hall – joining Winston Churchill as the only other non-Royal to have this honour bestowed upon them in the 20th century. Thereafter, he was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral in a ceremony that can only be likened to that of Lord Nelson a hundred years before. So who is this Lord Roberts, the person behind poems, and memorials throughout the length of the former British Empire? And why is a figure who was buried by his King alongside the bodies of Wellington and Nelson been neglected in recent years? This is a darkness and light story of empire, fame, notoriety, and charity. From hanging 'traitors' in Afghanistan and using scorched earth tactics and even concentration camps during the Boer War in South Africa to his family providing charity and opportunity for wounded veterans, Roberts—once paralleled with the Duke of Wellington himself—remains a compelling, if problematic, figure who won incredible victories including a famous march from Kandahar, foresaw the Great War with Imperial Germany, carefully crafted his own legend in pursuit of recognition at home, and even interacted with figures as well known as Rudyard Kipling and Lord Kitchener with whom he served in the Boer War. Lord Roberts became our subject of long-term interest due to the proximity of his Glasgow statue. For many years, Lord Roberts’ state stood, nestled in a grove of trees, outside my house. I would walk by him each day on my way to and from the Glasgow University Archaeology Department. His prominence and anonymity—he seems to have every honour available and fought in every 19th century colonial war but without any sort of modern name recognition—made us wonder: “Who was this man of past importance?” The conservation of his statue by Nicholas Boyes Stone Conservation and Glasgow City Council in 2014/2015 made us even more curious.    In researching Field Marshall Lord Roberts’ incredible and varied life—which reads as though it is a “Boys’ Own” adventure—we met his biographer, Dr. Rodney Atwood. Dr. Atwood kindly spoke to us about Lord Roberts.           After the interview, stay with us and we will walk down to Lord Roberts’ statue and discuss its aesthetics and place in the Kelvingrove Park landscape. Dr.

The late Stuart Hall said cultural studies, within a Marxist tradition,  enables us "to understand culture - cultural discourse - the place and relationship of the ideological." In this podcast, which is part of our Marxism in the 21st Century series, Steve Edwards, Professor of History of Art at the Open University talks to Kieron Yates about Marxism and Culture.  They explore how Marxism can be seen as a profoundly aesthetic philosophy, with many of its central categories coming from thinking about art and aesthetics, the organisation of sensibility......   VOICE: STUART HALL:  It's not that Marxism is not around but that the kind of conversation which Cultural Studies conducted with …   against some aspects of … around the questions… expanding a Marxist tradition of critical thinking... that is absent and that is a real weakness. I think important gains were made which enable us to understand culture... cultural discourse… the place and relationship of the ideological. So I think a lot of ground was covered... kind of  conceptual ground was covered which could go to enrich the position provided the basic conversation is re-engaged but if it's not re-engaged then that interim period... you know ... Cultural Studies lost its way and will find it again.   Kieron Yates: Hello and welcome to Pod Academy. You just heard the late Stuart Hall with an assessment of the status of Marxism in Cultural Studies he gave to the academic Sut Jhally in 2012. In this edition of Pod Academy I speak to Steve Edwards - Professor of History of Art at the Open University - about the development of culture studies in Britain out of particular Marxist traditions and ask if more recently Marxism has been able to reassert the relevance. I began by asking what Marx and Engels themselves had to say about cultural phenomena. Steve Edwards: Its  patchy to start with.  I think there are two things to say about that…   they were very educated men of there time, with very extensive literary tastes in the  high culture of particularly Europe… very well read. I don't think that there is any point where they... there is no extensive development in the ideas of Marx and Engels. Marx did originally plan to write an aesthetic he never did so ... he wrote poetry as a young man... Engels wrote some kind of ... there are occasional pieces... largely on literature but I think beyond that what's important about what they did is to recognise that in some senses Marxism is a profoundly aesthetic philosophy... that so many of its central categories come from thinking about art and aesthetics… the organisation of sensibility.  So the whole debate for instance on alienation on the alienation of labour ... the debate about fetishism...the whole sense about a kind of future society which will overcome the divisions between mental and manual ... that will heal the rifts of class; these are fundamentally aesthetic categories. So I think, more than just thinking about what they explicitly wrote about art or literature, what's important is to think about how the discussions and thinking, particularly in German idealist philosophy, about art entered fundamentally into shaping their view of the world.   KY: Marx and Engels can be seen as part of a tradition of social criticism that was taking place in the Nineteeth century that encompassed thinkers and writers on aestheticism such as Ruskin, Carlyle, Arnold and Dickens. At times intensely conservative, romantic in sensibility and anti-modern, this aesthetic critique of capitalism also found a more progressive voice in William Morris.   SE:   There's a separate trajectory there,  which is  there's a kind of tradition of British social criticism that's very centred on art in the 19th century. One might think about Ruskin, about Carlyle, about Dickens and Arnold. These are figures that fundamentally reject capitalism... they reject the new kind of modernity.

Podcast produced and presented by Craig Barfoot The past 25 years have witnessed the most rapid economic and social development the world has ever seen. In our increasingly globalised world, if something happens in one place, the aftershocks move quickly around the globe.  Globalisation creates systemic risks. Professor Ian Goldin,Director of the Oxford Martin School, University ofOxford. and author, with Mike Mariathasan,  of The Butterfly Defect:  How globalization creates systemic risks, and what to do about It talks to Craig Barfoot about the joys and perils of gloabalisation. By any measure – life expectancy, nutrition, infant mortality, income – we see improvements.  But the unintended consequences of hyper globalisation such as microbial resistance, obesity, water shortages, climate change, as well as the threats from hyper complexity and integration -  growing inequality, cyber attack, terrorist attack, pandemics and financial crises suggest that the gap between the world’s ability to control its affairs, and what is happening on the ground, is widening. If we look backwards at globalisation, the glass if half full – there has been significant progress.  But if we look forward 25 years and ask is this progress likely to be sustained, the answer is probably not, it is essential that we learn to manage globalisation and the systemic risks it poses. A systemic risk is one that cascades across sectoral boundaries – it is not confined to an industrial or commercial sector, or a country.  The 2008 financial crisis was the first systemic risk, it started with the banking industry, but crossed industrial boundaries, flattening industries and putting people out of work, and it fanned out across national borders. The financial crisis should be seen as a wake up call.  We need to learn from the financial crisis, put in place the necessary reforms.  But the lessons have not been learned and it is likely that there will be another financial crisis. The Butterfly Defect looks in detail at the financial crisis, but transposes some of the lessons to potential crises involving pandemics, infrastructure, supply chains, ecology, environment and business systems. The question is, how do we manage complexity and prevent our hyper connected systems leading to contagion and risk?  How, for example, do we ensure that airports are places for conveying people and prevent them becoming places that convey pandemics? Part of the answer lies in understanding the nature of the risks we face.  For example, we must ensure that no place, as well as no industry, is too big to fail.  Much risk has become geographically concentrated (eg servers in Nevada, banks in Wall Street). It is also crucial that our international institutions are up to the challenges posed by globalisation – the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, the United Nations, for example.  At present they are not. Ian Goldin also discusses the paradox of the rise of nationalism in this increasingly globalised world.  Many people feel that the world is out of control and respond by trying to put up walls (trade protectionism, anti immigration laws, referenda for leaving the EU ) and go back to an imagined, safer past. This is Professor Goldin's second podcast for Pod Academy.  See also  Divided Nations: global challenges, global governance  Photo by Lars Plougman

The deep past extends its tentacles into the present and, in Work, Sex and Power  Willie Thompson, until his retirement Professor of Contemporary History at Glasgow Caledonian University, demonstrates how this affects our species. He talks to Pod Academy's Craig Barfooot about how, in recent years such approaches, covering lengthy stretches of time and continents, have taken on greater prominence, with terms like ‘Deep History’ and ‘Big History’ entering the vocabulary.  This approach has been stimulated by a deepening awareness of the apocalyptic threat to humanity caused by runaway global warming and species destruction. The inability of the small-scope historiography favoured in previous decades to generate much illumination regarding this crisis has proven its limits. Willie Thompson's book is part of this new tendency but with a differing emphasis in important respects. It begins with argument on humans’ place in the universe and where they stand in the evolutionary process. It is concerned to emphasise both the continuity of humans with the animal kingdom and the wider biosphere, but also the categorical difference of their existence as social creatures equipped with language and, in their forelimbs, manipulative abilities possessed by no other creature. One early chapter discusses the evolution of conscious thought and the unique attribute of humans, in that through a developed form of consciousness they envisage their future selves, and their future projects, unlike any other species. WORK In this interview, Willie Thompson and Craig Barfoot explore the Palaeolithic era in which the original Homo sapiens lived their hunter-gatherer foraging lives in  isolated family groupings and clan communities. This was a prehistoric period of human history, distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools and covers roughly 95%[1] of human technological prehistory. The discussion then turns to the next ten thousand years following what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ which rapidly emerged over all the continents with the exception of Australia. Crucially, it is notorious for ushering in the shift to production (via agriculture and herding) of animal and vegetable foodstuffs which replaced the earlier process of food acquisition ‘in the wild’. These techniques originated in what we now call the Middle East and also developed quite independently in different areas of the globe such as the Americas and China. The driving force was almost certainly climate change – as the glaciation of the latest ice age melted, humans experienced both environmental catastrophe, but also beneficial effects. The consequences of this transformation for the societies involved were truly enormous and are still noticeable today. In the words of Jared Diamond,author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years ‘The hand of history’s course at 8000 B.C. lies heavily on us’. The history since the Neolithic Revolution has been the history of forced labour, which has four structural forms varying in their details and frequently intermixed: exaction of tribute from producers; serfdom or bonded agricultural labour; outright slavery and wage labour.  Debt emerged as a powerful mechanism used to force individuals into one or other of these forms of forced labour. Work, Sex and Power explains how wage labour in the context of market economies became the prevalent form of economic compulsion thanks to the second great historical transformation: the creation of technologies that succeeded in unlocking the immense energies imprisoned in fossil fuels, a process that commenced around 300 years ago and proceeded to give us the world we now experience. SEX the history of civilisation has been the history of forced labour it has also been the history of misogyny.  One gender has cruelly exploited the other, throughout all times and social categories – from th...

The deep past extends its tentacles into the present and, in Work, Sex and Power  Willie Thompson, until his retirement Professor of Contemporary History at Glasgow Caledonian University, demonstrates how this affects our species. He talks to Pod Academy's Craig Barfooot about how, in recent years such approaches, covering lengthy stretches of time and continents, have taken on greater prominence, with terms like ‘Deep History’ and ‘Big History’ entering the vocabulary.  This approach has been stimulated by a deepening awareness of the apocalyptic threat to humanity caused by runaway global warming and species destruction. The inability of the small-scope historiography favoured in previous decades to generate much illumination regarding this crisis has proven its limits. Willie Thompson's book is part of this new tendency but with a differing emphasis in important respects. It begins with argument on humans’ place in the universe and where they stand in the evolutionary process. It is concerned to emphasise both the continuity of humans with the animal kingdom and the wider biosphere, but also the categorical difference of their existence as social creatures equipped with language and, in their forelimbs, manipulative abilities possessed by no other creature. One early chapter discusses the evolution of conscious thought and the unique attribute of humans, in that through a developed form of consciousness they envisage their future selves, and their future projects, unlike any other species. WORK In this interview, Willie Thompson and Craig Barfoot explore the Palaeolithic era in which the original Homo sapiens lived their hunter-gatherer foraging lives in  isolated family groupings and clan communities. This was a prehistoric period of human history, distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools and covers roughly 95%[1] of human technological prehistory. The discussion then turns to the next ten thousand years following what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ which rapidly emerged over all the continents with the exception of Australia. Crucially, it is notorious for ushering in the shift to production (via agriculture and herding) of animal and vegetable foodstuffs which replaced the earlier process of food acquisition ‘in the wild’. These techniques originated in what we now call the Middle East and also developed quite independently in different areas of the globe such as the Americas and China. The driving force was almost certainly climate change – as the glaciation of the latest ice age melted, humans experienced both environmental catastrophe, but also beneficial effects. The consequences of this transformation for the societies involved were truly enormous and are still noticeable today. In the words of Jared Diamond,author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years ‘The hand of history’s course at 8000 B.C. lies heavily on us’. The history since the Neolithic Revolution has been the history of forced labour, which has four structural forms varying in their details and frequently intermixed: exaction of tribute from producers; serfdom or bonded agricultural labour; outright slavery and wage labour.  Debt emerged as a powerful mechanism used to force individuals into one or other of these forms of forced labour. Work, Sex and Power explains how wage labour in the context of market economies became the prevalent form of economic compulsion thanks to the second great historical transformation: the creation of technologies that succeeded in unlocking the immense energies imprisoned in fossil fuels, a process that commenced around 300 years ago and proceeded to give us the world we now experience. SEX the history of civilisation has been the history of forced labour it has also been the history of misogyny.  One gender has cruelly exploited the other, throughout all times and social categories – from th...

This podcast was produced and presented by Kieron Yates Climate change, environmental pollution, privatisation of the biosphere, water crises are all signs of the impact of neoliberal policies on our environment, but where will the solutions to these problems come from? Thirty years ago, there seemed to be a disconnect between an ecology movement that had emerged in the 1960's and the traditional left - neither readily  embraced the other. But over the last two decades there's been a rediscovery of a strand in Marx and Engels' writings that relates to the environment, and this has led to the growth of an eco-socialist movement that campaigns not just on issues of environmental concern but also social justice. Pod Academy's Kieron Yates talked to Chris Williams, Adjunct Professor at PACE University in the Department of Chemistry and Physical Sciences and Gareth Dale, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Brunel University Kieron began by asking Chris Williams what was the reality of the disconnection between the environmental movement and socialist politics of the 1980's.  Chris Williams:  There was a strand in Britain of what could be termed deep ecology which was more commitment to protecting the earth and naturral systems... saving the whale and natural systems and less concerned with the social world or social justice questions... which is obviously more of a left sociualist concern. But there was also another strand to environmental concerns in the 1980's, in Britain anyway... which was CND and the campaign for Nuclear Disarmamanet... and just the general idea that the world was in a very bad sitauation with regards to the possibility of nuclear warfare and what did that mean in connection to nuclear power stations and nuclear power. I think in Britain my recollection is that there were different strands but certainly the left was somewhat disassociated from both in a certain regard but certainly much more so from the idea that we should promote the natural world over and above any concerns for the people in it, as if there was this big split between the two and we didn't depend on each other. That was proababy most evident in the United States with the people of Earth First which split off from what they thought were the sellouts of the mainstream environmental movement and turned anti-human in many ways... and some sections of it embraced HIV and AIDS as a way of cleansing the earth, depopulating it of a human virus and other despicable ideas like that. So, there were different strands even within the deep ecology movement... some of them were overtly racist and so the left would obviously have condemned that anyway. The situation has definitely moved on since then. Kieron Yates: When I began doing research for this podcast I was surprised to discover Marx and Engels themselves had a highly developed concept of the relationship between capitalism and the environment and it's a theme that is explored in both Marx's Capital and some of Engels' later writings - in fact, to my mind, their thinking still seems remarkably contemporary and holistic. I asked Gareth Dale if this was a fair assessment. Gareth Dale: I think your surprise is related to the fact that the thought of Marx and Engels was for a long time interpreted in very orthodox ways by social democratic and communist parties for most of the twentieth century and these were parties that were linked to very state centered modernizing projects… geared to economic growth, and geared to urbanising society and to capital accumulation at the end of the day… whether that was in the form of state capitals in Soviet Union and eastern Europe and in social democratic nation states in western Europe and elsewhere. These were parties therefore that interpreted Marxism in a very growth orientated modernising framework which fetishised technology. I remember I lived in East Germany for a couple of years and I remember the children’s...

For half a century Professor Ted Robert Gurr has conducted social science research and theorised about the causes and consequences of organised political rebellion and protest. His latest book, Political Rebellion Causes Outcomes and Alternatives is a collection of essays looking at how and why, and to what effect, millions of people - from the Castro-inspired revolutionary movements of Latin America in the 1960s to Yugoslavia’s dissolution in ethno-national wars of the 1990s, and the popular revolts of the Arab Spring - have risked their lives by participating in protests and rebellions. In this interview with Professor Gurr, Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot explores In which political systems are rebellions likely to be successful and in which are they likely to be unsuccessful How effective are protest movements as alternatives to rebellions and terrorism? What public and international responses lead away from violence and toward reforms? Political Rebellion: Causes Outcomes and Alternatives is published by Routledge

Has the world of commerce encroached irrevocably on our civic spaces, and how much do we care? Civic Workshop is asking that question and looking at ways to reframe our everyday local experiences with an awareness of our collective social and political future. A key part of Civic Workshop is the new Civic Radio. We are hoping to cover a lot of their output here on Pod Academy - take a listen to this first podcast in which Jo Barratt talks to writer and urbanist Adam Greenfield @agpublic about a new vision for the civic.  How much is civic exclusion growing because of what participation demands or expects of us? Civic Radio will be on the road, seeking out the people and organisations that are exploring these topics in different ways. http://www.civicworkshop.city/blog/2015/2/10/civic-radio-episode-01

On Friday 7th November 2014, Manchester Metropolitan University and the Centre for the Study of Football and its Communities hosted a conference entitled ‘Football and Culture 2014.’ The event aimed to explore the relationship and interaction between football and wider forms of cultural representation, with papers exploring topics as diverse as fanzines, commemorative statues, fictional representations of the game, and emerging online phenomena. Pod Academy’s Christopher Daley was the co-organiser of the event and he managed to find time to conduct a series of interviews with some of the speakers. Below you can find further information about each of the speakers featured in the above podcast. David Goldblatt Conference paper: England is Paradise? The Meaning of Football since Thatcherism David Goldblatt is a writer, academic and broadcaster. He has published widely on world football and his new book, The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football, explores the recent history of the English game. In the podcast he discusses some of the themes in his new work, whilst also touching upon the specific transformations within the sport since the reign of Margaret Thatcher and the establishment of the English Premier League in 1992. David Webber Conference paper: Karl Polanyi and the Cultural ‘Everyday’ Political Economy of English Football David Webber is a Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick and spoke at both the conference and to Pod Academy about the work of the political economist Karl Polanyi and how his ideas might be applied to a critical analysis of the everyday experience of watching and following football. Joel Rookwood Joel is a Senior Lecturer in Sport Management at Liverpool Hope University. At the conference he screened his short film Rio: Football and Favelas, which was followed by an informative talk. He spoke to Pod Academy about his time in Brazil and his experience of visiting a favela in Rio during the 2014 World Cup. You can watch Joel’s film here. Ronnie Close Conference paper: Filming Sublime Conflict in Contemporary Football Ronnie Close is an artist and filmmaker and he treated the conference to a screening of his most recent film, Serious Games, which also focused on the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Ronnie spoke to us about this recent project but also touched upon his broader reasons for selecting football as the focal point for many of his films. You can see clips from Ronnie’s films through his website, which can be found here. For further information about this event, visit the Football and Culture webpage. Pod Academy has a podcast on Racism in the Beautiful Game in which Mark Doidge of the University of Brighton talks to Alex Burd.  

Here at Pod Academy we are convinced that podcasting is a great way to get research out to a wide audience, to make an impact. If you'd like to try your hand at making a podcast, here are some tips to help you, they came out of a course we ran for our volunteer producers.  And take a listen to the podcast above  - it demonstrates a number of different approaches you might take. Preparation Preparation 1: Preparing around the CONTENT What are you trying to achieve? First of all decide, what are your objectives for the podcast.  Of course two of your principal objectives will be: To make people care about the subject To entertain But you may have other objectives, such as: – To get the audience to see the relevance for themselves of this research To help your audience understand something complex To inform them about something new in the field To introduce them to something quirky they may not know about It may be that your objectives span all or none of these, but whatever you are aiming to achieve, be clear about it from the outset as this will help in your preparation and will inevitably influence the questions you ask, the tone, the writing and the editing. What is the story? Why should we care? This American Life’s Alex Blumberg says you should be able to pitch a story in this way: I want to make a podcast about….. It’s important because….. According to Alex this simple formula will give you the story.  Other people talk about this as ‘the angle’ of your podcast.   It is certainly an essential stage to go through in the preparation for your podcast. To decide what is the angle, have a preparatory conversation with the academic whose research you are covering and really pin him/her down on the following questions: Why is your research/your work/your book important? What is the significance of your research/this area of study/your work? We hear a lot about……….these days – how does your research relate to that? What is your big idea? What is the take-home message of your research/your work/your book? What is the story? What is ground breaking about it? Why should the audience care about your research? If it were a newspaper article, what would the headline be? Remember, one way of finding the angle is to see if there is an ‘est’ word associated with the research – the first, the best, the worst, the biggest, the smallest, the most, the last etc. Ask the academic. After that conversation, think about it yourself.  Decide:  What is this podcast about? The audience Part of your preparation should be to think about your audience and what would interest them.  Pod Academy has a broad audience, but it is helpful to imagine just one listener, because then you are more likely to make an appealing podcast, that works as a communication from one person to another.  Try this listener: A bright, engaged 28year old who is prepared to listen to and maybe even sign up with Charity street fundraisers, who probably plays or watches a bit of sport, has good friends who he/she values, has a favourite soap opera, and listens to an eclectic range of music. Importantly, has a 40 minute commute to work, during which time they listen to podcasts. How can you engage/entertain/inform this listener?   Chunking the content Think of your content in 4 chunks (note: they might not divide up as neatly as this suggests – for example, in the interview you might ask some of the more detailed questions in Chunk 4 when you are on chunk 3 about the significance of the research.) Chunk 1:  Why did they undertake this research? You are looking for 2 main things here – personal motivation, any important background/context about this field. The sorts of questions to ask…… Why did you undertake this research; what attracted you to this area of research? Is there any significant history to this area of research? What’s been happening in this field?

'Water wars' used to seem like the stuff of science fiction.  But water poverty is creating major geopolitical upheaval right now in the real world.  It contributed to the Arab Spring in Egypt, and to the growth of ISIS in Syria argues Dr Karen Piper, who teaches post colonial studies and English and is adjunct professor of geography at the University of Missouri. In this conversation with Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot, about her extensively researched book, The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos   Dr Piper paints a disturbing picture of the world's journey towards the 'coming chaos' -  including dams that dessicate neighbouring countries and an International Monetary Fund that insists on developing countries handing over their water to multinational corporations who make a profit from drought. The UN has declared access to clean drinking water to be a human right, but can do little to enforce that right. Karen Piper says that is was scary in conducting her research, to talk to climate scientists, and to see the droughts and coastal erosion and species moving.  But, she says, she met dedicated activists, and her hope is that people can make the change. Picture of water droplets by Matt Newman  

16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence is an international campaign, spearheaded by the United Nations,  which takes place each year, and runs from 25 November, (International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women), to 10 December (Human Rights Day), ‘16 Days Campaign’ is used as an organizing strategy by individuals and groups around the world to call for the elimination of violence against women and girls. Pod Academy's Isabella Grotto went to talk to researcher and campaigner, Betsy Stanko, Honorary Professor of Criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London and to Diana Nammi and Sara Browne of IKWRO (Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation) which works on so-called 'honor based' violence such as forced marriage, domestic violence and female genital mutilation. They looked at the shocking levels of violence against women in Europe, described earlier this year in the research report, Violence against women: an EU-wide Survey and at the work Betsy Stanko has done in quanitfying the economic costs of violence against women.   Refuges in the UK are closing, and cuts in legal aid have had a devastating impact on women's safety.  But Betsy Stanko says this is very shortsighted, and not only as a moral issue.   The costs of violence against women and children reverberate down the generations. Here is the transcript of the podcast: Isbella Grotto:  Earlier this year the EU issued a report on violence against women, which made headlines in the UK and beyond. Based on interviews with over 40,000 across 28 EU member states, it revealed that one in three women had reportedly experienced some form of physical or sexual abuse since the age of 15. Betsy Stanko: I think what’s important about the recent EU study is that one has some comparative data; but also what we find in that study is it seems like the countries where the conversation about violence against women is the most advanced, that is they talk about it as something that is common in their lives, they actually have the highest numbers of reports of violence against women. So Sweden has high figures in this study, the UK has high figures and I think that has something to do with enabling women to name what experience they have had better than women in other countries, where they just think it’s something that women endure, it’s just part of their lives and it’s not an unusual thing to be named. What we’re saying is that it’s common, but it’s also something that we don’t want. IG: As early as the 1990s Betsy’s research focused on investigating the issue of violence against women from an economic perspective. In particular, it sought to analyse the cost to society of these crimes. BS: I did my first walk up Fifth Avenue in 1971, I started a refuge for battered women in 1978 and I’ve done lots of work around rape and sexual violence as well. I think we, as feminist researchers, spent a lot of time trying to quantify how much violence against women there was, a lot of work on naming it and changing the concept and moving it from “that’s just what it’s like to be a woman” to “we would like to be able to not have this in our lives. By the Nineties it was always a debate around how much, how prevalent, and to me I thought, well, prevalence is one thing, but actually it’s a hidden cost; not only the consequences in terms of how you bear that cost, that is individually as a woman you bear that cost, but I was trying to move the argument from: “it’s an individual problem” to “it’s a societal problem”, because the consequences are actually very costly, particularly in a welfare state. Now, not only has that been borne out over time, but actually there are different discourses now, in terms of thinking about the issues. Even in a troubled family discourse, that is, what are the kinds of family that draw most on the public purse, what you find in those families are high levels of violence,

"Nature has been defined as a woman, and both nature and women were then defined into objectification and therefore into objects of violence. Ecofeminism is a celebration of the creativity of nature and the creativity of women," says Dr Vandana Shiva, world renowned Indian environmentalist, activist and scientist, in this conversation with Pod Academy's Lucy Bradley about her book, Ecofeminism (co-authored with Maria Mies, Zed Books). This podcast, which also includes the presentation by Vandana Shiva at SOAS, in October 2014, is produced and presented by Lucy Bradley. Vandana Shiva has written many books, (including Staying Alive-Women, Ecology and Development;  Monocultures of the Mind;  and Soil not Oil) and Lucy started by asking her how this book, EcoFeminism, came about: Vandana Shiva:   Well the book has a very interesting genesis. Maria Mies had written Patriarchy and Capital Accumulation on a World Scale, I had written Staying Alive and that had done very well and it was the first time a title was connecting, the issues of the paradigm of development happening to women in the third world and what was happening to ecosystems in the third world. Zed [publishers] asked if both of us could do a book combining North and South perspectives. Of course we didn’t have the time to actually sit together so we just decided to write our chapters and share them every month. And it shows there are common patterns [being experienced in these different places] because we’d write chapters and they’d be about the similar phenomena. And one was in rich, rich, rich Germany and the other was in India - which at the time we wrote it was not part of this ‘shining’ India campaign – and the book chapters then just fell into place, not because we’d planned and said we’ll write chapters on this, but because both Maria and I do thinking engaged in activism. There’s an illusion that you have to be either an intellectual or an activist and the two don’t meet. In my view, real reflection of the world we’re in can only come from engagement in that world, not by sitting in an ivory tower and imagining you know all. When you don’t write with a vested interest, when don’t write because you are serving some master, when you write in the freedom of your mind and your spirit, with a deep connection of compassion and involvement and inclusion with every being and every person whose being trampled on you don’t get dictated [to]. Lucy Bradley: And what’s the main thesis of the book? VS: Eco feminism is really looking at the dominant world view and structures it has created which have been driven by the convergence of capitalism and patriarchy, and looking at it from the point of view of nature and women. This is for a number of reasons, first because the oppression of nature and women served the building of this paradigm; nature was defined as a woman and both were then defined into objectification and therefore into objects of violence. Ecofeminism is a celebration of the creativity of nature and the creativity of women and it is basically in a way waking us up to see the illusion that capital creates. The new edition of Ecofeminism of course is an update. [But] everything we said –whether it was the violence had just gotten worse and whatever we said about alternatives have just flourished better, and I’m sure if we were to reissue twenty years from now, I don’t’ know if we will be around, but the two trends will just have deepened. LB: You have anticipated my next question, is ecofeminism gathering momentum? VS: when we wrote ecofeminism there was a whole new generation of young women who were fed up with academic feminism which had in a way totally turned it’s back on the women’s movement. We mustn’t forget that women’s studies grew out of the womens’ movement and in the early days theorising and activism was one, and then you got into this academic strand. And what happened was at that time when young women who were ...

"Nature has been defined as a woman, and both nature and women were then defined into objectification and therefore into objects of violence. Ecofeminism is a celebration of the creativity of nature and the creativity of women," says Dr Vandana Shiva, world renowned Indian environmentalist, activist and scientist, in this conversation with Pod Academy's Lucy Bradley about her book, Ecofeminism (co-authored with Maria Mies, Zed Books). This podcast, which also includes the presentation by Vandana Shiva at SOAS, in October 2014, is produced and presented by Lucy Bradley. Vandana Shiva has written many books, (including Staying Alive-Women, Ecology and Development;  Monocultures of the Mind;  and Soil not Oil) and Lucy started by asking her how this book, EcoFeminism, came about: Vandana Shiva:   Well the book has a very interesting genesis. Maria Mies had written Patriarchy and Capital Accumulation on a World Scale, I had written Staying Alive and that had done very well and it was the first time a title was connecting, the issues of the paradigm of development happening to women in the third world and what was happening to ecosystems in the third world. Zed [publishers] asked if both of us could do a book combining North and South perspectives. Of course we didn’t have the time to actually sit together so we just decided to write our chapters and share them every month. And it shows there are common patterns [being experienced in these different places] because we’d write chapters and they’d be about the similar phenomena. And one was in rich, rich, rich Germany and the other was in India - which at the time we wrote it was not part of this ‘shining’ India campaign – and the book chapters then just fell into place, not because we’d planned and said we’ll write chapters on this, but because both Maria and I do thinking engaged in activism. There’s an illusion that you have to be either an intellectual or an activist and the two don’t meet. In my view, real reflection of the world we’re in can only come from engagement in that world, not by sitting in an ivory tower and imagining you know all. When you don’t write with a vested interest, when don’t write because you are serving some master, when you write in the freedom of your mind and your spirit, with a deep connection of compassion and involvement and inclusion with every being and every person whose being trampled on you don’t get dictated [to]. Lucy Bradley: And what’s the main thesis of the book? VS: Eco feminism is really looking at the dominant world view and structures it has created which have been driven by the convergence of capitalism and patriarchy, and looking at it from the point of view of nature and women. This is for a number of reasons, first because the oppression of nature and women served the building of this paradigm; nature was defined as a woman and both were then defined into objectification and therefore into objects of violence. Ecofeminism is a celebration of the creativity of nature and the creativity of women and it is basically in a way waking us up to see the illusion that capital creates. The new edition of Ecofeminism of course is an update. [But] everything we said –whether it was the violence had just gotten worse and whatever we said about alternatives have just flourished better, and I’m sure if we were to reissue twenty years from now, I don’t’ know if we will be around, but the two trends will just have deepened. LB: You have anticipated my next question, is ecofeminism gathering momentum? VS: when we wrote ecofeminism there was a whole new generation of young women who were fed up with academic feminism which had in a way totally turned it’s back on the women’s movement. We mustn’t forget that women’s studies grew out of the womens’ movement and in the early days theorising and activism was one, and then you got into this academic strand. And what happened was at that time when young women who were ...

More and more women are going into the law as solicitors, barristers, legal executives, academics.  Indeed, in England and Wales more women than men now qualify as barristers.  But far fewer women get promoted to the highest levels. There is only one woman, Brenda Hale, on the UK Supreme Court. Around the world, feminists have been developing an important critique of legal systems and the assumptions underpinning law making. So what does it mean, 'being a feminist barrister'? Two feminist lawyers, Alison Diduck, Professor of Law at University College London, and barrister and novelist Elizabeth Woodcraft spoke at a meeting of the Haldane Society - Pod Academy was there to record what they said. Elizabeth Woodcraft, whose latest collection of short stories, A Sense of Occasion has just been published, made another podcast for Pod Academy, about feminist legal judgments, what would be the impact of having feminism informing the writing of legal judgments. The podcast features supreme court judge Justice Baroness Brenda Hale and Professor Rosemary Hunter of Queen Mary College, Univ of London and Professor Rosemary Auchmuty, of Reading University. Photo:  Mike Cough/Blogtrepreneur

'Virtual economies' are all around us, from social media, to bitcoin, to the games on our smartphones. But what exactly is a virtual economy?   And is there anything that these virtual economies can teach us about 'real world' economics? Pod Academy's Alex Burd returned to the Oxford Internet Institute to speak to Vili Lehdonvirta, a research fellow there.  Alex previously interviewed Vili about Bitcoin for us (podcasts: Bitcoin 1  and Bitcoin 2). This time he went to talk about Vili's new book, Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (by Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova, MIT Press, 2014)     In developing digital games, designers often develop an economy within the game itself.  These economies can drive the game, just as an economy does in the real world.  Then there is bitcoin - is that developing into a useable currency?  And can we learn anything about economics from understanding what is involved in clicking 'like' or 'retweet'? Vili became intrigued by what these virtual economies might teach us.  He started by explaining that he and Edward Castronova first got the idea for the book at a conference of digital game developers in San Francisco: Vili Lehdonvirta:  I’ve been going every year for the past 5 years to a digital developers' conference to give a talk there about what the academic study of virtual economies can teach game developers and digital developers. In 2010 I was there on a panel about virtual economies in online games, it was a panel where all of the panelists were academics and the game developers were quizzing us. One of the questions was ‘What should I read if I want to make use of economics and economic sociology. Should I just pick up an economic textbook.’ My co-author, Edward Castranova, was also on that panel. The two of us thought ‘well, if you pick up an economics textbook in theory everything is the same. But in practice everything is focused on very different objectives'. Then we thought, we’ll write the text book for you! Obviously we also wanted to make it interesting to academics so it’s a slightly broader book than just for developers. Alex Burd: So you you wanted to write a book for developers who wanted to know more about economics and academics who wanted to know more about games. VL: That’s right, game developers and digital developers more broadly. Not just games but anyone who is developing online communities or shared information pools or crowd sourcing systems or a new virtual currency – that’s one of the audiences. The other audience is academics and social scientists who are interested in media and social communications and are interested in behaviour and power in digital media. Basically we’re arguing to scholars that if you want to understand how digital media affects behaviour, whose power it enhances, what kind of behaviours are valued and privileged, and what kind of constraints and budgets are placed on use, then you really have to take this economic perspective on digital media. You can’t just treat it as communication, as speech, as abundant bits that are only restricted by creativity. There also these very concrete constraints and choices and ownership and exclusivity that are programmed into the infrastructure of digital media, everything from social media to numerous games that people play every day. And understanding that is crucial for any scholar studying digital media. AB: Looking at social media specifically, it’s about being able to put some kind of value on the interactions that users have with publishers. What value someone clicking 'like', or someone clicking 'retweet', has? VL: It’s that, yes, but it goes beyond just economic value. Microeconomics fundamentally is a science of choice, choice under constraint. Most internet scholarship is about how suddenly scarcity disappears and there is abundance. You don’t have to choose which music file you want because you can download both and then share them to your f...

What is the universe made of?  What is 'dark matter'? Why is the universe still expanding? These are just some of the questions astrophysicist Professor Katherine Freese tackles in this wonderfully accessible interview with Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot. Katherine Freese, is the George Eugene Uhlenbeck Collegiate Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan  and author of The Cosmic Cocktail: Three parts dark matter, the inside story of the epic quest to solve one of the most compelling enigmas of modern science—what is the universe made of?     The ordinary atoms that make up the known universe—from our bodies and the air we breathe to the planets and stars—constitute only 5 percent of all matter and energy in the cosmos. The rest is known as dark matter and dark energy, because their precise identities are unknown.  Prof Freese explains that new galaxies come about when dark matter clumps together, indeed it is dark  matter that dominates structure formation rather than atoms. However, we are not sure what dark matter actually is (though the favourite candidate is WIMPS (weakly interactive massive particles)) Prof Freese is one of the world's leading astrophycists, but this is an interview that the layperson can enjoy.  For example, she talks of telescopes as 'time machines' - light takes 10 minutes to reach us from the sun, but the further out into space we look, towards distant galaxies, the further back in time was the light emitted, maybe even a million years ago. 'My secret mission is to encourage young people, especially young women, to become scientists', says Katherine Freese,   'When people talk about creativity, they think about the arts - but it is scientists who are in the sweet spot here'. The New Scientist magazine said of The Cosmic Cocktail: Physicist Katherine Freese drinks deep of her life's adventures and cosmic mysteries alike in her captivatingly frank book The Cosmic Cocktail  

Podcast produced and presented by Craig Barfoot What makes us human? When, why and how did the human brain evolve? Professor Clive Gamble argues that it was not the tools that form the bulk of the archaeological record, but rather the social world within which our ancestors lived that drove the development of the human brain. In this conversation with Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot, he suggests that the evolution of the social brain tells us not only about human behaviour in the past but also about the importance of networking in our complex modern world. Clive Gamble  is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton. His work involves the study of our earliest ancestors and in particular the timing of global colonisation. This podcast focuses on his most recent book, Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind. . The featured photo with this podcast is by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

Research suggests that 10% of children are victims of bullying and 5% of children are involved in bullying others. Defined as 'repeated aggressive behaviour intended to harm, and involving an imbalance of power', being bullied can feel like an unending nightmare to a child who is being targeted. So who is likely to be a bully, and can we predict who is more likely to be bullied?  What are the gender differences?  And what about cyber bullying? In this podcast, Emeritus Professor Peter K Smith of Goldsmiths, University of London talks to Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot about his book, Understanding School Bullying, Its Nature and Prevention Strategies, he explains what forms bullying talkes and what parents can do to help.       You may also be interested in our podcast on Young Girls Friendships, which explores the often worrying dynamics of girls' friendship groups. Featured photo by Thomas Ricker  

This podcast is part of our Geoff Dyer series – a series of recordings from a conference dedicated to Dyer’s work held at Birkbeck, University of London. It features Dr Bianca Leggett, Teaching Fellow in British Studies at Harlaxton College and is presented by Jo Barratt. This year marks 25 years since the publication of Geoff Dyer’s first novel, The Colour of Memory. Geoff is a multi-award winning writer who has written 4 novels and is also known for his essays. He’s been described by the New York Times as ‘one of our greatest living critics’ The colour of memory series was recorded for Pod Academy at Birkbeck, University London at a conference dedicated to Dyer's work. This podcast is a talk given by Bianca Leggett from Harlaxton College, University of Evansville on Dyer's latest book Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush.   Photo by Chris Boland:  www.chrisboland.com     Click here for the other podcasts in the series What colour was the 1990s? Counting Backwards: a quarter-century of The Colour of Memory

This podcast is part of our Geoff Dyer series – a series of recordings from a conference dedicated to Dyer’s work held at Birkbeck, University of London. It features Dr Morgan Daniels of Queen Mary College, University of London and is presented byJo Barratt This year marks 25 years since the publication of Geoff Dyer’s first novel, The Colour of Memory. Geoff is a multi-award winning writer who has written 4 novels and is also known for his essays. He’s been described by the New York Times as ‘one of our greatest living critics’ The colour of memory series was recorded for Pod Academy at Birkbeck, University London at a conference dedicated to Dyer's work. In this podcast, Morgan Daniels steps slightly away from  directly discussing the authors work to consider the fascinating proposition: “What colour was the 1990s?’   Photo by Chris Boland:  www.chrisboland.com     Click below for the other podcasts in the series: What colour was the 1990s? All at Sea: Soldiers and Slackers in the Writing of Geoff Dyer Counting Backwards: a quarter-century of The Colour of Memory

This podcast is part of our Geoff Dyer series - a series of recordings from a conference dedicated to Dyer's work held at Birkbeck, University of London. It features Dr Joe Brooker, Reader in Modern Literature at Birbeck and is presented by Jo Barratt. This year marks 25 years since the publication of Geoff Dyer’s first novel, The Colour of Memory. Geoff is a multi-award winning writer who has written 4 novels and is also known for his essays. He’s been described by the New York Times as ‘one of our greatest living critics’ The colour of memory series was recorded for Pod Academy at Birkbeck, University London at a conference dedicated to Dyer's work. In this podcast, Joe Brooker from Birkbeck University of London, looks back at the colour of memory.   Photo by Chris Boland:  www.chrisboland.com       Click below for the other podcasts in the series, produced and presented by Jo Barratt. What colour was the 1990s? All at Sea: Soldiers and Slackers in the Writing of Geoff Dyer Photo: @AlexJohnWill

This podcast was presented and produced by Jo Barratt This year marks 25 years since the publication of Geoff Dyer’s first novel, The Colour of Memory. Geoff is a multi-award winning writer who has written 4 novels and is also known for his essays. He’s been described by the New York Times as ‘one of our greatest living critics’ The colour of memory series was recorded for Pod Academy at Birkbeck, University London at a conference dedicated to Dyer's work. In this introductory podcast the author sits down with conference convenor Bianca Leggett to talk openly and widely about his work and also hear from several experts on his work. The following recording accompanies this podcast series and is Geoff Dyer reading two passages from his latest book ‘Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush’     Photo by Chris Boland:  www.chrisboland.com Click here for the other podcasts in the series What colour was the 1990s? All at Sea: Soldiers and Slackers in the Writing of Geoff Dyer Counting Backwards: a quarter-century of The Colour of Memory     Transcript to follow                  

Introducing Hari Kunzru Hari Kunzru is an award-winning British novelist famous for authoring several highly acclaimed novels, including The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004), My Revolutions (2007) and Gods Without Men (2011). Named among the twenty best young British novelists by Granta in 2003, Kunzru is also a PEN activist and 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. Since his debut novel’s publishing in 2002, he has cemented his role as one of Britain’s most acute observers and commentators on modern life and its intricacies. “Transmission: A Conversation with Hari Kunzru”, was an event in honour of the author held at Birkbeck, University of London, in June 2014. In the Podcast, Kunzru answers questions about his work and there is additional insight and context provided by experts studying his work. There is also advice on ‘where to start with Kunzru’ for listeners wishing to learn more about the novelist. A roller-coaster ride of surrealism, dystopia and satirical humour, Kunzru’s works come to life to both challenge preconceptions and shatter the boundaries of genre in contemporary British writing. This podcast was produced and presented by Jo Barratt, with Isabella Grotto Transcript Jo Barratt: Welcome to Pod Academy. In this podcast we welcome the author Hari Kunzru, who came to read and answer some questions about his work at an event at Birkbeck university of London. The event was co-convened by Bianca Leggett, who explained her reasons for bringing this group of academics, writers and fans together to discuss Kunzru's work. Bianca Leggett: My work looks at British contemporary fiction and new cosmopolitan forms and tries to bridge those things together, which is something Hari's work does. I have been very struck by the sense that Hari Kunzru's work, by being so restless and inventive, really stretches over a great deal of expertise and scholars haven't been brought together before and I was determined to make that happen, and I'm delighted it finally has. JB: Before Bianca speaks to the author, we're going to get an introduction from some of the attendees on the day. Dave Gunning is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Birmingham. Dave Gunning: Hari Kunzru first really came into prominence in this country as one of the Granta best young British novelists in 2003 on the strength of his one published novel at that time and academics get worked up about to what extent he can be classed as a British novelist, given the global themes that are inside his work, but certainly they seem to identify the talent correctly. The Impressionist, which also won the Betty Trask prize, is the story of an Indian boy travelling around various identities in the early Twentieth century. It takes a sort of romp through the colonial era, but it's also completely tied in to contemporary concerns about identity, what it means to be authentic, what it might mean to actually possess an identity, and throughout subsequent works we see this mix of an intellectually informed level of understanding of debates around culture, and particularly contemporary culture, tied to this wonderful storytelling sense. We see how the contemporary world is experienced and how people orientate themselves within that. In Transmission, the second novel in 2005, we get a computer virus bringing together the worlds of Bollywood cinema, brand management, fortress Europe, and the low status of Indian "tech" workers in the US. It's a broad, intertwining and very funny book. In 2007, My Revolutions is more serious in tone and revisits the political activism of the 1960s in Britain. In 2011 he revisited this the network novel, his interconnected narratives, in Gods Without Men, with these broad marks of crossing historical periods, both finding a geographical base in the unearthly landscapes of the Mojave Desert. Last year, Kunzru's story, Memory Palace formed the centre of an exhibition at the V&A in which a number of visual artist...

July marks 20 years since the end of the Rwandan genocide. In the summer of 1994 the death of president, Juvenal Habiyaramana sparked brutal violence between the country’s two major ethnic groups. The genocide took place over 100 days but left an estimated one million people dead. Two decades on,Pod Academy's Alex Burd went to Manchester to speak to Dr Richard Benda, a Rwandan academic and genocide survivor. Their conversation has been split into three podcasts - of which this is the third (the first was about faith and reconciliation;   the second about ethnicity and democracy). In this episode he recalls the events of the genocide and begins by explaining what it was like growing up in Rwanda as a half Hutu, half Tutsi... Richard Benda: It made your life uncomfortable and I think that is a good thing – not to be comfortable in either group because the lack of comfort makes you sick. A better way of dealing with things but once you are told that you are Tutsi 100% or Hutu 100% it is as your life is pre-determined to a go certain way so operating on the margin of both groups it wasn’t easy. As a child you take your father’s identity but you can’t deny your mother’s side of the family. Alex Burd: Which was which in your family? RB: So the father was Tutsi and the mother was Hutu. But then even on both sides it wasn’t that clear cut so I’ve never been comfortable calling myself a Tutsi or a Hutu because it really doesn’t register. And you try to convey that idea to people who have a certain stability in their ethnic identity and it’s as if the image is that everyone is... you’re either one or the other. But I think that debates are showing that there are quite a lot of people on the margins. You negotiate the reality as it comes, some days are good, some days are bad. You could escape violence or you could die because of that ambiguity of your identity. But given the choice I would still remain in an ambiguous state and you can open your heart and your mind to accepting more people, to accepting distance because you live a state of contradiction within yourself so you accept that contradictions exist in society as well so I developed that mentality at a younger age anyway. I have cousins in one group, I have cousins in another group, I have uncles in one group. You sleep in one house today, then another house. How do you choose? AB: How did you then negotiate that, almost a tightrope I guess, during 1994, while you were at university? RB: It wasn’t a good time to start university. We started university in ’93 and it was a bad, bad time. We started university when the president of Burundi had been assassinated, so that was a Hutu president being assassinated and we had quite a few Burundian students in our midst, so tensions were palpable when we started. The war was still going on so there were tensions within Rwanda and there were endless killing of Hutu politicians. I had a girlfriend in 1993 at university so I suppose I had an outlet for my feelings – I lost her in ’94, but then... what I’m trying to say is that you had someone to share those difficult times with. We had to escape university because before the genocide started the university was on lockdown and the students were on strike. They don’t know if it was a politically engineered strike so even then it was dangerous for people of certain ethnicity to be on campus and we had to be quiet I suppose, to not make yourself more visible the you wanted to be and certainly my girlfriend what you would call a visible Tutsi person so she was even more of a target so we had to find a way of leaving the campus. Some of the friends we left behind were killed and we left our belongings, and I don’t have anything from prior to ’94 that belongs to me. The only item I have from before ’94 is my secondary school diploma, that’s the only thing I have from 1990. I don’t have a photo, an item of clothing because everything was lost at university.

In GBA 161 we get better acquainted with Jo. He talks about smell, history and memory, the intangible things. We explore ideas around his podcast Life in Scents and how they relate to his life. Jo Plugs: The Podcast: Life in Scents - iTunes / http://lifeinscents.com/ freelance audio and scents: jobarratt@gmail.com paying attention to your senses smelling a lemon I don't plug but probably should have plugged: Stand Up Tragedy: Tragic History at the Hackney Attic on Friday 16th May from 7.30pm: http://www.facebook.com/events/231570123709490/ We mention: RSA: http://www.thersa.org/ Pod Academy: http://podacademy.org/ This American Life: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/ NPR: http://www.npr.org/ Geranium: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geranium Distiller episode: http://lifeinscents.com/post/76108446561/darren-rook-is-the-co-founder-and-ceo-of-the Life In Scents: Astronomer episode: http://lifeinscents.com/post/33719749457/marek-kukula-life-in-scents Fennel seeds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fennel Steve episode: https://soundcloud.com/gettingbetteracquainted/gba-107-steve Brixton Academy: http://www.o2academybrixton.co.uk/ Lady Gaga: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Gaga You can hear Getting Better Acquainted on Stitcher SmartRadio, Stitcher allows you to listen to your favourite shows directly from your iPhone, Android Phone, Kindle Fire and beyond. On-demand and on the go! Don’t have Stitcher? Download it for free today at www.stitcher.com or in the app stores. Help more people get better acquainted. If you like what you hear why not write an iTunes review? Follow @GBApodcast on Twitter. Like Getting Better Acquainted on facebook. Tell your friends. Spread the word!

"Why would you choose to keep basing your politics on a concept which is as destructive as ethnicity?.......Twenty years is a landmark. We should rethink Rwandan post-genocide politics and how we start to implement a democracy which is more inclusive". This is the second of our podcasts to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, in which Rwandan academic and genocide survivor, Dr Richard Benda is in conversation with Pod Academy's Alex Burd. In this interview Dr Benda explores current issues around ethnicity and the role of the state, and in particular the role of the President Paul Kagame, in developing alternatives to the narrative of Hutu and Tutsi identity in Rwanda Dr Benda began by explaining the state of ethnicity in Rwanda today. Richard Benda: I think the issue is still there. The government came out and said outright that ethnicity is abolished. As a political discourse that works; you can’t pretend to be a government and say: ‘Fine, carry on’ But in reality the problem is there. And I don’t think it’s softening just because it is no longer talked about. I see danger in that. Alex Burd: You think because it’s not talked about? RB: Because people don’t come to that realisation alone, by a process of rediscovery of another identity, they come to that position because again the state or the government is telling them so. I think it is one of the dangers of successive regimes in Rwanda - that you tell people what to do as if people can’t come to the same conclusion by a process of democratisation, of dialogue. When you listen the words ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ are very key to the dialogue so it means that it is in the subconscious of the Rwandan people and they have to come out. If they are constructs you can only expose them and then deconstruct them and show how dangerous they are. Rwandans are smart people. Why would you choose to keep basing your politics on a concept which is as destructive as ethnicity. By opening the debate people can actually challenge themselves and find a better solidarity which is Rwandaness. We don’t know what that it is yet,  but Ndi Umunyarwanda is supposed to help people find out what it is. AB: For so much of Rwanda’s history it’s been governed along those lines of Hutu and Tutsi, so to all of a sudden decide that there’s no such thing as ethnicity is hard for the people who still remember that time before and change tack. RB: What I’m trying to say is that Rwandans have never had a healthy relationship with ethnicity because of the way ethnicity appeared, at least as a political component. I believe, as many people do, that the Belgians or the Germans or the missionaries did not coin the words because they are Rwandan concepts. So they are a Kinyarwanda concept and they existed in the culture and in the society. People disagree and agree, and agree to disagree about what it meant to be a Hutu, or a Tutsi before colonialism but certainly they were not as associated with political violence as they became in the 1950s. When they started being imposed on Rwandans in the 1930s Rwandans didn’t really have much of a choice –‘You are a Hutu, you are a Tutsi.’ Sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly. In the 1950s ethnicity was recuperated as a tool to overthrow monarchy and install democracy; democracy was wasn’t a national goal, it was almost the rule of the majority who happened to be Hutu. And then ’73 and ’90 and ’94, which is why I don’t think Rwandan people have had any time to sit and think about what is this thing called ethnicity which seems to govern our lives. We need to give people time to look ethnicity in the face and say ‘we don’t like what it’s doing to us’ and governments can’t just decide and say you are this today and you are not this tomorrow because people will always subvert those decisions. AB: So since 1994 Rwanda has been hailed as a success story I guess, in terms of economic progress under the leadership of Paul Kagame,

“Biography is actually a quest for lives that speak to us” said biographer Hermione Lee. So what is the role of the biopic in contemporary film culture? What is it that we are looking for in the increasingly popular 'biopic' genre - films like Selma, Diana, Saving Mr Banks, 12 Years a Slave or The Wolf of Wall Street that claim to be based on real life events and aim to depict episodes in the lives of their protagonists? Pod Academy's film specialist, Esther Gaytan Fuertes, went to talk to Tom Brown and Belen Vidal, two lecturers in Film Studies at King’s College London, about their recent book, The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, to find out more about this genre. Esther started by asking them if they felt the biopic was a neglected area in Film Studies.  Belen Vidal: Well, yes and no – it’s been studied but yes, perhaps it hasn’t been studied enough. The thing is that the biopic as a genre has always been there, I mean, it goes back to the beginning of film history. But the biopic has also cropped up as part of other genres and that’s the way it’s been looked at mainly by scholars -  as biopics that were part of the musical genre, or gangster films or Westerns... All those genres would have biographical elements or would occasionally do stories that are based on real characters, or real lives or people that existed. So, in a way, there’s been forming an idea of the biopic throughout film history as part of the popular genres, but the truth is that when Tom and I came into this project we also did it because we were interested that, in all this time, basically what we have is only two books, which are two excellent starting points to study the biopic, but it seemed very little considering the popularity of the genre. It’s worth mentioning that the first book that took the genre seriously or did a kind of serious comprehensive approach was George Custen’s book called Bio/pics: How Hollywood constructed public history – this was a book on the classical biopic, mostly films made in the 30s and 40s, and it focused on Hollywood. After that, recently we’ve had a book coming out by Dennis Bingham [Whose Lives are they Anyway?] about the biopic in contemporary film culture. And again this is a book that tackles the modern biopic - the biopic since the post war period and up to the contemporary moment. But, again, it’s very heavily leaned towards the English language. So we thought, why not doing a kind of more reviewing of the biopic in the last twenty years especially and how also the genre has spread, has become more visible internationally? Because what Tom and I were struck by was the huge number of films coming from very different national cinemas all marketing themselves as biographical films and many of them very often being immensely popular. If we think about La Môme (that was called La Vie en Rose) here, a French film about a French singer, Edith Piaf, making it all the way to the Oscars, all the way up to kind of the big time in Hollywood and it’s distributed all over the world. What were the conditions that were creating this appetite for biographical narratives and how these films are now becoming much more visible not only from Hollywood but from all over the world? So we wanted to study this phenomenon and say something about the biopic in contemporary film culture and that’s what the book is about. What approach do you adopt in your book to study the biopic? Belen Vidal: What we are really interested also is in the narrative structures, in the tropes that recur time and again. Is there such a thing as the poetics of the contemporary biopic? Is there such a thing as a kind of certain structures that are being used and reused time and again, new genres forming...? That’s what we were interested in when we were looking at the different chapters and bringing the work together and trying to find the different points in common between chapters that very often would tackle cycles and bodies of f...

Is the need for ritual hard-wired into human beings? From a Cherokee medicine man smoking a pipe to Sufi mystics whirling in ecstasy or Pope Francis celebrating mass – different as they may seem, all of these people engage in a form of religious ritual. There are even secular rituals, such as the chanting on football terraces. Wherever you go in the world, you will find people engaging in some form of ritual. What is it that makes rituals so universally meaningful and compelling? To find out, Jane Little talks to Nicholas Taylor, a shamanic practitioner who’s undergone a ritualistic live burial; Peter Williams, a traditional Catholic; and Isabel Clarke, a clinical psychologist. This podcast was produced by CTVC for its Things Unseen series of podcasts. CTVC is an award-winning media company producing television, radio and new media content on social issues, current affairs, religion, ethics, history and education.  Pod Academy is grateful to them for enabling us to carry this podcast in our Faith and Non Belief Strand. About Things Unseen In 2013, the independent production company, CTVC, commissioned a piece of original research, The Spirit of Things Unseen, on belief in post-religious Britain. The findings showed that over three-quarters of all adults (77%) and three fifths (61%) of non-religious people believe that “there are things in life that we simply cannot explain through science or any other means.” The research also revealed that nearly 60% of the UK population believe in some kind of spiritual being, and more than half of all adults think that spiritual forces have some influence on earth. To engage with the growing group of people who place themselves outside formal religion, but have a sense that there is “more to life than meets the eye”, CTVC created a new regular podcast, Things Unseen. Things Unseen aims to address the needs and interests of those who no longer feel they belong to a religious community, but retain some spiritual beliefs. At the same time, it also wants to engage with people who still identify with one of the main faiths – and provide a platform for both groups to talk to each other. You can contact the Things Unseen team by emailing:podcast@ctvc.co.uk

This podcast is drawn from a lecture by celebrated Egyptian author Ahdaf Souief about the ongoing revolution in Egypt.  It was the annual lecture of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at Kings College, London  and was held at the end of 2013. The State Crime Initiative studies and records the violations of human rights by governments and other state actors – genocide, torture, brutality and also corruption, cronyism, economic exploitation and negligence. As Ahdaf Souief makes clear, these things often go together, and overturning a criminal state is a long term and dangerous undertaking. She takes as her starting point the events in Mohammed Mahmoud Street, one of the streets running into Tahrir Square, which has been the site of much police and army brutality, and where many activists have been killed, including Jika   . On the day of the lecture, there were memorial demonstrations in the street, and Ahdaf had come from there to London for the the lecture. Ahdaf is introduced by Professor Penny Green, co-director of the International State Crime Initiative. A video of the complete lecture by Ahdaf Souief can be found here There is also a blog on Pod Academy, which you might like to read together with this podcast: Mubarak's Egypt: Nexus of Criminality  You might also be interested in our podcast of the ISCI Annual lecture 2011 by Noam Chomsky, Changing contours of world order.   Links Al Jazeera on shootings in Cairo in July 2013 Khaled Mohamed Saeed killed in Alexandria June 2110 - seen as the act that ;launched the revolution' the News piece on Jika 1 News piece on Jika 2

Mathematician Vicky Neale, senior teaching associate in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics in the University of Cambridge and director of studies at Murray Edwards College, is excited. She’s been watching some recent breakthroughs that mathematicians around the world have been making in a huge and open collaboration on an ancient mathematical problem. Neale tells Adam Smith how she is now building the news into her work that aims to improve the ways maths is taught. This podcast is produced and presented by Adam Smith   Adam Smith: I’m listening to a story about a lightbulb moment. That second when a school pupil’s eyebrows soar and her head lifts up: she’s got it. In this case, she’s found a solution to an algebra problem. Vicky Neale ...She suddenly realised that this algebra, which she’d sort of been introduced to at school, that she sort of half understood, that she could see why these manipulations worked. We drew a little picture, we talked about it, but she also suddenly understood how that had helped her to answer a problem. She’d been trying some numerical patterns, which is really important, that’s a lot of what mathematicians do, but we were chatting about how the next stage is to try and come up with a convincing argument. I might use the word ‘proof’, that’s sort of technical jargon, and she said, “But I’m not going to be able to do that ‘cause I can’t check all of these examples.” And I said, “That’s right, you’re going to have to come up with some other kind of justification.” And via this algebra, by a little calculation, she was able to do that and see that it was always going to be true and for her, I could see, “Oh, this is something a bit different from what I’m used to, I’m quite excited by that, I can see how this algebra gives me the capacity to do something much more than I ever thought I was going to be able to do...” AS: I’m Adam Smith. Welcome to Pod Academy. Vicky spends most of her time on a project with researchers and teachers trying to improve the ways mathematics is taught. Running beneath all of this work, like an underground river, is the enterprise of mathematics itself—the questions and the problems are flowing and bouncing off rocks and pushing forwards constantly through university mathematics departments across the world. I met Vicky at the college and started by saying that it seems to me that maths is a bit like Marmite—people either love it or hate it... VN: That’s right and I find that very sad for two reasons. One is that I think very often the people who are saying that who don’t understand why I’m so excited about maths, that’s because they don’t know what it is that I’m excited about. They have this perception that’s very different from my perception. The other is that I think sometimes people have this perception that maths is an ability either you have or you don’t have. It just sort of depends how you were born. And I start from the perspective that everybody is capable of thinking as a mathematician, is everyone going to go and get a Fields Medal in mathematics—the equivalent of a Nobel Prize? No of course not, because not everybody is going to want to spend their time, immerse themselves in it, but I strongly believe that everybody has the capacity to make progress, to understand all sorts of things. And we see in schools, extraordinary examples where successful teachers, successful departments are able to have this impact, of course it's trying to help everybody to have a positive experience so that whatever they go on to do they don't feel that maths is not relevant to them, they don’t feel that they’re unable to engage with it. AS: One of the other funny perceptions that a lot of people have about mathematics, probably myself included, is that it’s static, that there is a set of rules, your teachers try and teach you and that there are just these rules and you’ve just got to learn it,

 "Our minds are made up of all the same atoms and molecules as everything else in nature - the architecture of our brains was born from the same energy principles, the same pure mathematics that happens in flowers, and jellyfish and Higgs particles..." says astrophysicist Alan Lightman, Professor of the Practice of the Humanities. Creative Writing, Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in his new book The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew.  In this podcast he talks to Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot about the Big Bang (apparently it wasn't like an explosion), and how the universe created time and space when it started to expand.  He also takes us on a trip around multiverses, the many universes that science predicts exist, but which may be very different indeed from our own universe. But while it is possible that science may soon explain everything in the physical world, will it ever, he muses, be able to explain the feeling of being in love? Professor Lightman is an astrophysicist and also a poet and novelist. His best selling novel,  Einstein's Dreams, about the young Albert Einstein working on his theory of relativity but troubled by dreams explores human beings' relationship to time. It has been translated into thirty languages. It is this combination of science and humanities which is at the heart of this podcast.  

How good are we at understanding each other? Other people are complicated,  so when we try to guess what they’re thinking we often get it wrong.  Even with our partners!  Research suggests that partners are hardly any better (and sometimes worse) at guessing what each other believe or feel than a stranger. In this wide ranging conversation with Professor Nicholas Epley from Booth School of Business at Chicago University, and author of Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want,  Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot finds out about empathy, anthropomorphism, hubris and egocentricity. One thing they discuss is how our egocentricity makes us feel far more noticeable than we are.  As David Foster Wallace said, in Infinite Jest, “You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.” This was confirmed in what Professor Epley describes as 'the most liberating experiment in the entire field of psychology'. Research by Kenneth Savitsky; Thomas Gilovich; Gail Berger and Victoria Medvec found that no one in a room remembered the person wearing a Barry Manilow teeshirt, whereas the wearer of the teeshirt, embarrassed to be seen in this way, thought 50% of the room would remember! Other issues covered are: do we know what it is like to be tortured? or what it is like to be poor? and how modern warfare has distanced us from death (because if we are too close it is difficult to kill someone). This is a fascinating exploration of what scientists have learned about our ability to understand the most complicated puzzle on the planet—other people—and the surprising mistakes we so routinely make.

According to the World Health Organisation, more than 350 million people of all ages, suffer from depression.  Indeed it is a growing cause of disability worldwide and is a major contributor to the global burden of disease. This podcast looks at what is depression and at the latest research on mindfulness. It is made up of excerpts from two conversations between Professor Mark Williams, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Oxford University and journalist, Dr Danny Penman.   These conversations are part of an Oxford University series, The New Psychology of Depression, formed of 6 podcasts: What is depression* How is depression treated Can treatments such as cognitive therapy help Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy: A new approach to treating depression* Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy on trial Mindfulness and the brain [The conversations we have drawn on are starred.  They were published by Oxford University under a Creative Commons licence]. Depression is different from usual mood fluctuations and short-lived emotional responses to challenges in everyday life. Especially when long-lasting and with moderate or severe intensity, depression may become a serious health condition. It can cause the affected person to suffer greatly and function poorly at work, at school and in the family. At its worst, depression can lead to suicide. There are, however, effective treatments.  One treatment that is currently attracting a lot of attention is 'mindfulness' which draws on ancient Buddhist teaching, and is supported by developments in Neuroscience research. In this podcast Professor Williams explains what mindfulness is and how it can help those suffering from depression. He also talks us through a couple of mindfulness exercises. Notes: Mark Williams and Danny Penman are the authors of  Mindfulness: A practical guide to peace in a frantic world       Oxford University has a Mindfulness Centre, which hosts courses and suggests books, audio and video resources on mindfulness.. Watch Professor Mark Williams's Ted Talk on Mindfulness You may also be interested in Pod Academy's podcasts on Children's mental health, and Yoga and mental health.

The financial and ecological costs of driving, and the time we waste sitting in traffic jams, is leading many people to think about a more 'walkable' city.  The man who has thought and written most widely on this is city planner and architectural designer Jeff Speck, the author of ‘Walkable Cities - How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time.  Craig Barfoot interviewed him for Pod Academy. In rural, tribal societies with no technology, people move on average at three miles per hour because they are walking everywhere.  In most developed countries, if you add up the costs of driving a car, the time you spend earning that money and the time you spend in traffic, it has been estimated that we, too, move at about 3 miles per hour! Building new roads is no answer because the extra capacity is absorbed within 2 or 3 years by new car journeys.  A better solution might be to price driving at its true cost to society, and Jeff points to London’s congestion charge as one of the successes of this approach. But his big idea is ‘the walkable city’. We have learned that we have a smaller carbon footprint and a healthier population if we live in walkable cities. More and more young professionals (brought up on Seinfeld, Sex in the City and Friends) are opting to live in city centres, as are empty nesters who want to be able to get out and about even when they can no longer drive.  As Jeff says, “Downtown has become the new place of choice for those who have a choice.” But those who don’t have a choice are pushed towards the suburbs and transport costs they can ill afford, where ‘they require hyper-mobility just to buy catfood!’ So city centres are changing fast. They are increasingly seen as desirable places to live.  The next question is whether the young professionals in their twenties will stay in the centre, or move out to the suburbs ‘for the schooling’ when they have children. Jeff Speck's Ted Talk about walkable cities is here And you might also want to listen to our podcast on Walking tours of London, Is London like it used to be?

Since the end of the Cold War, American military superiority has been an undeniable fact.  But this superpower dominance is not the norm in world affairs.  With the rise of China as a ‘peer rival’ of the US, are we seeing a return to a more contested ‘business as usual’ ? And if we are, what are the implications? In this podcast, Pod Academy’s Craig Barfoot speaks to Dr Ian Speller, co author of Understanding Modern Warfare (Cambridge University Press 2008, £25.99) about various developments in naval capability, and in particular the naval aspects of China’s resurgence.  China is expanding its navy, and although Washington sees this as a threat, the Chinese themselves say any developing country would want to build up its sea power (given that historically threats to China have come from the seas,  it is perhaps understandable that they would feel this way). But for now, the US navy fleet has greater capability than all the rest of the world’s fleets put together.  This fleet is deployed in international waters as ‘protector of the global commons’, and it is not uncommon for fleets from different nations to meet and acknowledge each other in international waters.  But as global politics, and economic power, evolve and change – how long will this situation continue? Dr Ian Speller is a Lecturer in the Department of History at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He also lectures in defence studies at the Irish Defence Forces Military College and in maritime strategy at the UK Defence Academy and at the National Maritime College of Ireland. He is the author of The Role of Amphibious Warfare in British Defence Policy, 1945-56 (2001) and the editor of The Royal Navy and Maritime Power in the Twentieth Century (2005). Our podcast explores aspects of modern naval warfare, but Understanding Modern Warfare also looks at Strategy Land warfare Air and space warfare Irregular warfare Weapons of mass destruction Dr Speller is one of a number of co-authors, the others are: David Jordan, King's College London James D. Kiras, School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base, USA David J. Lonsdale, University of Reading Christopher Tuck, King's College London C. Dale Walton, Missouri State University If you have enjoyed this podcast you may also be interested in one or more of the following podcasts: Empire: the features of American global power The East India Company and its legacy  Divided Nations: global challenges, global governance UN in DRC 2: The challenges of the UN’s new offensive approach

For the last twenty years of his life, Marcel Duchamp was working secretly in a studio in New York to construct an installation called Étant Donnés, Things Given. In this, the final part of our series, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual, Rod Stoneman analyses Things Given and he reflects on how Duchamp opened new ways of thinking about art and creativity. The series is presented and produced by Esther Gaytan Fuertes You will find other podcasts in the series here: Podcast 1 on Fashion images Podcast 2 on graffiti Podcast 3 on music videos Podcast 4 on film and climate change Rod Stoneman: For the last twenty years of his life, Marcel Duchamp was working secretly in a studio in New York to construct an installation called Étant Donnés, or ‘things given’, —one, the waterfall, two, the lighting gas— which no one in the outside world was aware of. These images show the outside door and in that wooden door there are two small peep holes which, if the spectator gets close, you look through into the interior and the image [above] indicates what can be seen. And the most extraordinary aspects of this major work by certainly one of the twentieth century’s most significant visual artists, was to make something outside of the public domain and only release it after his death. So there was no marketing, there was no gallery, there was no commercial dimension. It was a most significant commitment to an activity but it was done in a way that, very subversively, was outside of the art world, the art market. A few years before he died he gave a speech called ‘The creative act’.  Interestingly before ‘The death of the author’ by Roland Barthes or Foucault’s essay or The Role of the Reader by Umberto Eco, Duchamp talked about the way the meaning of the work of the art is actually made by the spectator. His Étant Donnés offered the spectator a direct and physical experience of that meaning. Duchamp legislated that it couldn’t be photographed the first 15 years of its existence in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Obviously this was an epoch —in 1968 when it was constructed in that Museum— it was an epoch before everyone had a camera in their mobile phone. But actually the first photographs of it were only seen in the 80s, when that restriction had been lifted. So the spectator had to see it directly and personally and its implications and its meanings were constrained to that one-to-one relationship. This actually indicates something of a different way of making art and a much wider and more open and more democratic basis for art-making —leaving aside the commercialised, celebrity basis of commercial art galleries and artists. Duchamp actually suggested that all activity of making, which can be embarked upon by a wide or inclusive range of people actually could be understood as art-making. And it occurs to me that when sometimes people suggest that only professional training and high ability should legitimate creativity that the activity that everyone makes in the middle of the night, which is the highly textured coloured specific strange work of dreaming is actually an indication of the way Duchamp is right. Artistic creativity, imagination, intelligence and meaning are manufactured in a strange brilliant way by all of us on a daily basis. And the definition of what could be seen as a work of art needs to be rethought. I hope you’ve enjoyed this series. Remember you can listen to the six parts of Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual on Pod Academy’s website, where you can also find our other podcasts and stay up to date with the latest research.    Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual by Rod Stoneman is published by Black Dog (UK £19.95, US £29.95) It explores the complex and reciprocal dynamic between world and image in this most visually mediated society. Everyone ‘knows’ images can be false or deceptive, but we all live and work in constant denial of this idea and its...

This is the second in our two-part series on the UN's new offensive mandate in the Democratic Republic of Congo in which SOAS’s Dr Phil Clark talks to Paul Brister from Pod Academy about some of the causes of the conflict in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and some of the challenges facing the United Nation’s (UN) new Intervention Brigade that has recently deployed there. [You can find the first podcast in the series here] This podcast looks at the implications of the UN in DRC and its new proactive and aggressive approach – for the DRC, the wider region and for peacekeeping and the UN itself. It also contains a postscript outlining some of the developments that have taken place since Paul spoke to Dr Clark. First Paul Brister gives some background on peacekeeping... Paul Brister:  UN peacekeeping missions are normally authorised by UN Resolutions passed under Chapter 6 of the UN Charter, and are guided by three basic principles: consent of the parties; impartiality; and non-use of force except in self-defence and defence of the mandate. A UN peacekeeping force is thus deployed in a context where there is a peace to be kept. It often involves monitoring and enforcing a cease-fire agreed between two or more former combatants, who view the UN force as being neutral and impartial. Of course events on the ground can change rapidly: cease-fires may be broken, consent can become withdrawn, peace keeping forces may be tempted to stray into peace enforcement. And in the past the UN Security Council has been to slow to react. The classic case is Rwanda in 1994. During the 100 days of mass-genocide, the commanders of the UN forces on the ground [United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR)] repeatedly made ardent requests for authorisation to use their Belgian troops to intervene. These demands were consistently rebuffed and their mandate was never beefed up. Instead the troops were forced to stand idly by and helplessly watch the butchering. The UN troops had found themselves with a weak peacekeeping mandate in a situation that urgently required peace enforcement and were thus useless. Peace-enforcement operations are authorised under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter and have far more robust mandates, sanctioning armed intervention to impose a solution. They tend to take place in a context of conflict rather than peace – a situation that is preferred by one or more of the belligerents. Therefore, unlike with peacekeepers, peace-enforcers are not welcomed by at least one of the belligerents and are not regarded as neutral. The insertion of a peace-enforcement force can convince belligerents that compliance with an imposed peace is less painful to battling this force. Sometimes though, the conflicts have proved too deep-rooted and intransigent, and little more than a pause between rounds has ensued. In other cases the cycle of violence has been broken, providing the conditions necessary for a political process that paves the way to a lasting peace. Usually the aim of peace-enforcement has been to bring belligerents to the negotiating table. The goal has not been military victory but facilitating a settlement. And peace-enforcement operations have generally been outsourced or sub-contracted to other organisations. Although, for example, the UN Protection Force in Bosnia (UNPROFOR) was authorised to use enforcement action, coercive action was in reality left to NATO, which had been sanctioned to undertake enforcement measures alongside the UN peacekeeping force. This culminated in the replacement of UNPROFOR by the more ‘muscular’ NATO-led force, IFOR. Although the NATO-led operation rested notionally in the hands of the Security Council, in real terms NATO leaders, not the UN, called the shots.  Historically, it has generally been the case that the more aggressive the UN mandate for military action has been, the less control the UN has had over of it. This has been due to an understandable unwillingness o...

What does an image tell us about the reality it represents? Rod Stonemanʼs latest book, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual, explores the relationship between world and image in our visually mediated society. In this series, produced and presented by Pod Academy's Esther Gaytan-Fuertes, Rod Stoneman talks about some of the images analysed in his book. In this first instalment of the series, he examines the language of fashion. Rod Stoneman: This photograph is quite extraordinary in many ways. It comes from a magazine called Glamour, Glamour Magazine and it represents a young woman in a vivid red cardigan, I think, well I imagine itʼd be cashmere and sheʼs over intently reading a book by V.I. Lenin called The State and Revolution. It opens a whole series of questions about the relationship of fashion to the image system. One can say that the world of art thatʼs included in the domain of art within the image system has been widened and the boundaries are soft and inclusive —one probably can thank Marcel Duchamp for that, the ready made and some of his other contributions began to question and open the boundaries of the domain of art. Certainly by the XXI century many museums actually combine art and architecture or craft and art and also specific exhibitions may address fashion or food or even advertising. It somewhat integrates the domain of the commodity economy in art and to take fashion as an example of that. Fashion obviously extends back historically to all known forms of human history and society and was analysed in a more structural and rigorous way, I think, first by Roland Barthes who 1967 published a book in France called The Fashion System. He was just looking at verbal discourse and the way that it worked in the industry of fashion, but actually his approach can also work for visual representation. And there are many Fashion Studies courses in different colleges at the moment, the question is how critical they are, to what extent they perpetuate the fashion industry without deeper analysis and thought, to what extent they might begin to open up the political economy of fashion, the basic economy of fashion. I remember a strange moment when, quite a while ago, I was walking near Postbridge in Dartmoor, in Devon (South West of England) and encountered a farmer who was shearing all his sheep on that summer afternoon. And he explained that each fleece would be paid at £1 and the sheep takes a year to grow wool. And actually, coincidentally that thick fleece would produce enough wool for one sweater that Benetton would be selling for about £80. There was a kind of epiphany with an extraordinary disparity of relationship of 80 to 1 between the cost of the original raw material and the eventual consumer price of the finished garment, after manufacture, marketing and distribution. So thatʼs a dimension of fashion which is crucial; another one might be or could be called the libido of economy, the economy of the body. How fashion is part of a visual system that affects people and unleashed eating disorders such as anorexia... you know, thatʼs being well debated recently and Kate Moss, a model, was famous for her succinct phrase, ʻNothing tastes as good as skinny feelsʼ. All of these factors carry fashion in to an effect on social and economic structure and in fact, that effect is created with increased speed as people are affected by and respond to the fashion system and buy new garments on a increasingly speedy basis. The average purchase of garments in America by young people in 1991 was 33 a year, by 2006 that had risen to 69. And actually we donʼt have more living space to store or to keep so I guess the immediate obsolescence leads to clothes being discarded more frequently. And I guess itʼs time to think about that kind of economy. ................. Seeing is Believing: The politics of the visual is published by Black Dog (UK £19.95, US £29.

Podcast produced and presented by Jo Barratt. "No human sense is more neglected in ethnographic museums than sound".  The  Reel to Real project at the Pitt Rivers Museum seeks to redress the balance by making available, both in and beyond the museum space itself, the important sound collections donated to the museum over the past 100 years. In this podcast, the second in our Pitt Rivers series, Jo Barratt and Sarah Winkler Reid from the University of Bristol talk to ethnomusicologist, Dr Noel Lobley about the hundreds of hours of historically important and rare ethnographic sound held in storage in the museum, much of it known only to a handful of scholars. These sound recordings – which range from children’s songs in Britain to music from South America and the South Pacific, and from improvised water drumming to the sound of rare earth bows in the rainforests of the Central African Republic – have been preserved but until the Real to Real project have remained unavailable to members of the public, teachers, students, or to the communities from which the sound originates. Listen here to the first podcast, Louis Sarno and the BayAka Note:  The Reel to Real archive is being made available via SoundCloud Transcript Welcome to the Pitt Rivers museum at the University of Oxford. This is Pod Academy and I'm Jo Barrett. We're here for a series looking at the ethnographic sound archive at the museum. This episode is going to look in detail at the Reel to Real project and the work being done to make the most of an unappreciated resource. We also hear how sound can contribute to the overall museum experience. Noel Lobley is going to be an ever-present voice in this series as he guides us through several aspects of his work in ethnomusicology and sound archive. Noel Lobley: My name is Noel Lobley. I work here at the Pitt Rivers museum as an ethnomusicologist. I deal with a lot of the music and sound collections. For the last 18 months or so a lot of my time has been devoted to developing the sound archive. Pulling it out of storage and getting it digitised, heard and available. Also programming events to engage different audiences with the sound collections that we have here. JB: You will also hear from Sarah Winkler-Reid an anthropologist from the University of Bristol.  Who joined Noel and I in Oxford. For those of you who do not know about the museum, here is Noel to tell us about his place of work.   NL: The Pitt Rivers Museum is the University of Oxford's museum of anthropology and world archaeology it's got wonderful ethnographic galleries that are absolutely crammed with hundreds and thousands of objects from cultures all over the world. Some pre-historic, some modern. It was established by General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers who donated his collection here and has been curated here since [sic] 1884.   Henry Balfour was the first curator here, he was a polymath, he was ahead of his time. He was interested in decorative art, sound and music which started the collection of sound here which has been happening for over 100 years. There are photographic, manuscript and massive object collections. What you see in the galleries are used as research, teaching resources, and to engage the general public, such as children and schools. It is a very family friendly museum, it has won awards for being accessible to children. We have our own education department here. It's a varied and diverse museum, but it is a part of Oxford University. JB: Noel is here to talk to us about the Reel to Real project which is the focus of this episode. I asked him to sum up the project in one sentence. NL: Reel to Real is giving the Pitt Rivers' museum sound collection a voice. Reel to Real is a project designed to digitise, catalogue and make available online, in the museum galleries spaces, and further afield all of our unique ethnographic collections. The project finished this year in March when we launched th...

This is the first of a two part series in which Pod Academy's Paul Brister looks at the fundamentally new approach the UN appears to be taking to the crisis in the Kivu provinces in the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In it he speaks to Dr Phil Clark, Reader in Comparative and International Politics, with reference to Africa, from The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), to consider the causes behind the conflict; why the UN is changing tack and deploying an aggressive intervention Brigade; and what this brigade’s chances of success are. But first Paul explains the context.... The paradoxically named Congo Free State was famously the setting for Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. The country has changed its name four times since then, but the title of Conrad’s novella seems as apt a description of the DRC today as it was then. Sat astride the equator and covered in jungle, the country receives high rainfalls – and has the highest frequency of thunderstorms in the world. Beset on all sides by countries that have themselves been ravaged by conflict – including Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, and South Sudan – armed rebel groups have repeatedly strayed across its porous borders, spilling conflict into the DRC and igniting war there. Following the Rwandan genocide in 1994 – which was perpetrated by the Hutu Interahamwe and republican guard – the Hutu regime in Rwanda was overthrown by the Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Around two million Hutu refugees fled into neighbouring countries, including Zaire, as the DRC was then known. These refugees included many Hutu troops and militia members who had participated in the genocide, and who promptly proceeded to militarise refugee camps, which they used as bases to make incursions into Rwanda to bring down the new RPF-dominated government. This led to the First Congo War. By 1996, the RPF’s patience had run out. Allied with Uganda, Rwanda launched an invasion of Zaire in support of their favoured proxy force, the AFDL [Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo] led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila. The border refugee camps were rapidly flushed out and the fleeing Hutu militants pursued westwards. The regime of longstanding dictator Mobutu Sese Seko crumbled and Kinshasa was taken. In May 1997 Kabila pronounced himself president of the retitled Democratic Republic of Congo. Before long however, fearing that they were planning a coup, Kabila turned on his erstwhile military backers, ordering all foreign forces out of the country and forming an alliance with the very Hutu rebels he had previously fought. Withdrawing to the East, Rwanda and Uganda each established a new rebel group – [the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie (RCD) and the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC)]. The following year these two rebel groups and their backers attacked the DRC army igniting the Second Congo War. The ensuing conflict sucked in a further six African nations and as many as twenty non-state armed groups were involved, leading some to describe it as the African World War. Over five million people were killed, mostly from preventable diseases, and there was widespread use of rape and torture. By the time the war had officially ended in 2003, the country was on its knees. Despite its huge wealth in untapped mineral resources – which at some estimates are in excess of US$24 trillion – the DRC has the second lowest nominal GDP per capita in the world. The DRC also takes joint last place with Niger on the Human Development Index scale, scoring just 0.304. Measured in terms of life expectancy, literacy, education, standards of living, and quality of life, the lot of the Congolese is the most miserable in the world. So in this most troubled region, the DRC stands out among its peers as the most troubled. And in this shattered country, the provinces of North and South Kivu in the far east of the country stand out as the most woebegone.

Are you sick of the overheated, braying politics of Westminster, where there is a lot of heat, but not much light? What’s the alternative?  Try this: A rational parliament would be ruled by free thinking and would respect the balance between personal values and scientific research.  It would value independent reasoning above organised thinking, such as uncritical political party allegiance.  It would debate current live topics. It would be open to reform.  It should be configured in a horseshoe and at least two individuals who have conducted publicly funded academic research on the topic would have to be in attendance.  Every member would have the same right to speak, and no one should make a personal attack on a fellow member of the speaker. In its debates, claims of research findings should be supported with references to academic literature and provided on request. Members proposing a motion should take no more than five minutes to do so and any member who receive payment related to the views they take on a topic must declare such payments. Well, Pod Academy’s very own Adam Smith (producer of many of our science podcasts) has launched such a Rational Parliament, and it held its first debate earlier this month – on genetically modified foods (the attached podcast gives you a flavour of the opening presentations). The first sitting was characterised by live tweeting about the debate (with all  #GMatRP tweets projected onto a huge screen at the front of the hall), and by the services of a ‘rhetoric officer’, Johnny Unger, a linguist from Lancaster University, who pointed out the rhetorical devices people were using to persuade others.  In the end the following motion was passed: This House agrees that GM food has a contribution to make in meeting global food demand. Future topics are likely to include badgers and bovine TB, alcohol minimum pricing, wind farms, climate change and education – all highly controversial topics which would benefit from the Rational Parliament’s  ‘let’s look at the evidence and the ethics’ approach. If you are interested in attending the next RatParl, either as an MRP (member of the rational parliament) or an observer in the gallery, just sign up at the ratparl website, and follow them on twitter at @ratparl .

Pod Academy's Daniel Marc Janes speaks to playwright and academic Dan Rebellato, Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway and one of Britain’s leading theatrical commentators. Daniel Marc Janes: I’m in the Calder Theatre Bookshop in London. It couldn’t be better located to evoke Britain’s theatrical heritage, situated as it is on The Cut alongside the Old Vic and the Young Vic. Looking at the bookshop’s selection, I can see plays from some of the most distinguished British playwrights of recent years. Here’s David Greig... Sarah Kane... Dennis Kelly... Mark Ravenhill. What all these writers have in common is that they all studied drama at the university level. But drama at the university is a recent innovation. Many of Britain’s most brilliant playwrights have been autodidacts: Tom Stoppard, George Bernard Shaw, William Shakespeare. So why study drama? I’m in the downstairs rehearsal space of the Calder Theatre Bookshop. This is a place where writers and performers go to make plays come alive. But how far can the inscrutable, mysterious act of playwriting be taught in an academic environment? What is the role of drama in the university? To talk about these topics, I’m joined by Dan Rebellato, Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway, author of numerous stage and radio plays and of several books, most notably 1956 And All That: The Making of Modern British Theatre. Professor Rebellato, thank you for joining us. Dan Rebellato: Thanks very much. DMJ: So before we start to unpack the broader questions, I’m wondering whether you could outline for us a kind of potted history of drama as an academic discipline in the British university. DR: There are lots of examples, of course, of theatre being made in universities and that goes back centuries, but drama as an academic discipline really starts in the late 1940s at the University of Bristol. Oxford University, during the war, set up a commission to see if drama was a suitable subject for the universities and it was a very ramshackle affair. They booked the wrong flights and they lost their luggage and they ended up with half the amount of time they were supposed to have. And they recommended that you shouldn’t do drama at the university. But the University of Bristol decided that it was a good subject and that was the first degree – I think that started in about 1947, 1948, something like that – and the big waves of expansion followed from there. Manchester, Hull was quite early, but the 1970s had a lot of expansion and the 1990s saw another big wave of expansion as well. DMJ: But what’s interesting is that drama, as an academic course outside of English, took some time to be accepted. Even at Bristol it took them 21 years for drama to be a full honours degree. You mentioned the committee at Oxford; Oxford and Cambridge stopped short of having full honours drama courses. Where do you think that this lack of acceptance comes from? DR: A lot of things that I think are interesting about the theatre are the reasons why it can sometimes be a difficult subject in the academy. Because it’s neither purely literary, nor is it purely a live experience. It’s a kind of mixture of the two. I think that in academic terms – of course there are certain kinds of theatre that are, in a sense, purely live and also purely literary – but also I think there’s a sense in which theatre is clearly a collection of different crafts and skills, because you have scenic designers and you have actors and you have directors and you have writers and composers and so on and so on. That maps on in the academy into the fact that it’s a very interdisciplinary subject. So in order to fully – if you could ever fully understand theatre – you’d have to be a bit of a linguist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a psychologist, a bit of an archaeologist and so on and so on and so on. And the question is left: if you took those things away,

To celebrate National Walking Month (May 2013), Pod Academy finds out about nightwalking in London from Medieval times to the Romantics.

The list of films and actors on Academy Award Theater is very impressive. Bette Davis begins the series in Jezebel, with Ginger Rogers following in Kitty Foyle, and then Paul Muni in The Life of Louis Pasteur. The Informer had to have Victor Mclaglen, and the Maltese Falcon, Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet (this movie was his first major motion picutre role) plus Mary Astor for the hat trick. Suspicion starred Cary Grant with Ann Todd doing the Joan Fontaine role, Ronald Coleman in Lost Horizon, and Joan Fontaine and John Lund were in Portrait of Jenny. How Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio were done is something to hear! Some films are less well known, such as Guest in the House, with Kirk Douglas and Anita Louise, It Happened Tomorrow, with Eddie Bracken and Ann Blythe playing Dick Powell and Linda Darnell's roles, and Cheers for Miss Bishop with Olivia de Havilland. Each adaptation is finely produced and directed by Dee Engelbach, with music composed and conducted by Leith Stevens. Frank Wilson wrote the movie adaptations. John Dunning in his book,"On the Air, The Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio,"tells us why such a fine production lasted less than a year: "The House of Squibb, a drug firm, footed a stiff bill: up to $5,000 for the stars and $1,600 a week to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for use of the title.

The list of films and actors on Academy Award Theater is very impressive. Bette Davis begins the series in Jezebel, with Ginger Rogers following in Kitty Foyle, and then Paul Muni in The Life of Louis Pasteur. The Informer had to have Victor Mclaglen, and the Maltese Falcon, Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet (this movie was his first major motion picutre role) plus Mary Astor for the hat trick. Suspicion starred Cary Grant with Ann Todd doing the Joan Fontaine role, Ronald Coleman in Lost Horizon, and Joan Fontaine and John Lund were in Portrait of Jenny. How Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio were done is something to hear! Go To GoDaddy, use the promo code blu19 and save 10%

Stars and movies with Oscars were the idea - in most cases, the movie stars recreated their academy award roles for the show, or in other cases, fine actors played the parts and gave it a different character. Both ways make for great radio drama and first class Hollywood motion picture star entertainment. The Lux Radio Theater had been doing this kind of radio show in the grandest manner for many years, but sponsor Squibb had the hubris and deep pockets to take on the competition by doing Academy Award Theater right after the Second World War. The year 1946 was pre-television, and so movies were still the major American visual art form, with radio the other popular network entertainment. In this final pre-TV time, Academy Award Theater was thought of as a premier radio production, a wow show, much like CinemaScope was to be in the 1950's when Hollywood felt the box office blow of early TV. Online Meetings Made Easy with GoToMeeting Try it Free for 45 days use Promo Code Podcast